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FWIW a lot of this history is covered in PBS's "Triumph of the Nerds" documentary without the dramatic license. Kudos to the producers for attempting to make BI
by sehugg 12y ago
FWIW a lot of this history is covered in PBS's "Triumph of the Nerds" documentary without the dramatic license. Kudos to the producers for attempting to make BIOS reverse engineering look exciting, though.
- sleepychu 12y agoThough it's my understanding that they could have just booted into DOS and performed list on the BIOS? (To get the compiled binary)
- sehugg 12y agoYeah, extracting would be the easy part (the engineer did say as such in the episode). I doubt they would have transcribed it by hand in 1983. Writing the spec was the hard part, it actually took nine months and a team of 15 to produce the final BIOS. (assuming we're talking about Compaq here, but the show keeps it intentionally vague)
- fit2rule 12y ago"performed list" on the BIOS? How did that work, exactly? In the very early days of the IBM PC, it wasn't so easy, alas. I guess they could have used DEBUG.COM to get a dump, but this isn't quite "performing a list": http://www.mess.org/dumping/dump_bios_using_debug http://www.mess.org/dumping/dump_bios_using_debug