Yeah, 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

Yeah, 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)