On Sun, 26 Oct 2008 09:39:34 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> I think Compaq bought the reverse-engineered BIOS from Pheonix. That's
> my memory, at least.

That could well be.  I don't know that I ever heard the specifics beyond 
Compaq was involved and it was a clean-room reimplementation.

>> 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.
> 
> Oh, you're talking about selling end units. I was talking about selling
> it OEM. Kind of hard to make a good profit on commodity manufacturing,
> is what I meant.

Yeah, end units is my point.  Agree on the profitability on the 
components, you've got to sell a lot of them to make money, and that 
includes keeping production costs really down.

>> That could be it - a combination of what you remember and what I
>> remember is probably closer to reality. :-)
> 
> Yeah. I'm pretty sure my first clone was indeed a Compaq, at least. But
> I remember the lawsuits about Phoenix, too.

Yeah, Compaq did have the first clone - that's probably what's driving my 
memory of it.

>> 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.
> 
> They did, or at least went far enough into the discovery process to
> figure out they'd lose. I actually studied that one in one of my
> graduate classes.  IANAL.

Cool.  IAANAL. ;-)

Jim

Post a reply to this message