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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, November 09 2012 @ 01:45 AM EST |
IBM was not interested in the personal computer business. It meant nothing to
them.
IBM has always been, and probably always will be about business solutions.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: tiger99 on Friday, November 09 2012 @ 08:29 AM EST |
They published the Technical Reference Guide, which contained BIOS listings and
other useful stuff. The only bit missing was Gates' buggy ROM Basic, which was
copyrighted by Micro Soft, and could not be published by IBM. Disclosing code
does not give you the right to reuse it, so source can be published while
remaining proprietary, and that is what happened. But there were masses of
detail, sufficient to create a clean room implementation of the BIOS which is
functionally correct, and that is what the clone manufacturers or their BIOS
supliers did. All legal and above board, provided that the clean room method was
used, ie.e. one engineer examines the IBM code and writes a sdetailed
specification, then another, who has never seen the code, writes a new BIOS from
the specification.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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