Jim Henderson wrote:
> True, but at the same time, that information being reverse-engineered by 
> Compaq really opened up the PC market;

I think the pheonix bios did more than Compaq did. The hardware was all 
very well documented by IBM before the clones started coming out, as was 
the BIOS. People didn't used to try to hide that sort of thing. :-) IBM 
wanted people building cards for it, just like Apple did for the
Apple ][.

> it also commoditized (or helped 
> commoditize) PC hardware and reduced the costs so most people could 
> afford one.  Or two.  Or ten. ;-)

Yep yep.

> Which in turn has moved PC sales from a low-volume high-margin sales 
> model to a low-margin high-volume sales model.  Seems to have worked out 
> fairly well for most PC manufacturers.

I dunno about that. Worked well for, say, manufacturing plants in China. 
I don't know that it worked well for people actually selling the end 
product.

> Eventually, clean room reverse-engineering would expose those internals 
> anyways, and arguably the type of process Compaq followed isn't something 
> IBM could have sued over - the guys developing the Compaq BIOS were 
> working entirely from specs drawn up by the guys who were looking at how 
> the BIOS worked.

Yeah. Except I think you're confusing Phoenix with Compaq. Compaq made 
the hardware. Phoenix cloned the BIOS first.  (Unless I'm misremembering 
something.)

And yes, IBM *did* sue over it. That's why Phoenix followed the 
clean-room approach to start with. The original IBMs came with a 
complete commented source listing of the BIOS when you bought them. 
(Well, maybe it was an extra packet, part of the assembler or something, 
but it was an off-the-shelf purchase.)

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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