On Fri, 24 Oct 2008 09:14:53 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> 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
> ][.

My recollection was that Compaq was first with the reverse-engineering, 
but Wikipedia conflicts with what I recall as well.  It may well have 
been Phoenix.

>> 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.

I used to sell hardware (Amigas were the main machines, but we had some 
PC hardware that was sold).  The commoditization of PC hardware lowered 
the entry level price to where it was affordable for normal people.  For 
IBM, as I recall, that happened with the early PS/2 models (the price on 
the PC/XT/AT as I recall was still relatively high).

>> 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.)

That could be it - a combination of what you remember and what I remember 
is probably closer to reality. :-)

> 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.)

I know (from reading that Wikipedia article) that Phoenix was concerned 
about it - but I don't recall IBM suing over it.  But I didn't follow the 
legal issues then the way I do now, either.

Jim

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