On Wed, 7 Mar 2001 14:55:17 -0800, Colin Davidson wrote:
>Well, as I recall, IBM came out with the original PC and immediately five or
>six small operations made their own BIOSes. IBM then sued all and sundry for
>IP violation, except one of them had anticipated this move and did the
>following:
>
>The hired a team of engineers to disassemble and analyse the BIOS.
>The company hired a second team of engineers who had no contact
>of any kind with the first team (and provably so), which then wrote a BIOS
>from the specs.
>The company was called Pheonix BIOS if I
>recall correctly. So to be safe, you have to follow the same path as a
>minimum. Implementing an independant BIOS is OK, but using any code from
>another is a definite legal no-no, no matter how that code is derived.
You have the story exactly correct. IBM thought that they *might* sell
somewhere in the neighborhood of 60,000 IBM PC's, so they were willing
to give 1/3 of the computer to Intel, and 1/3 of the computer to
Microsoft. The 1/3 they kept themselves was the easiest part to clone!
In the end, they saw how foolish that was. Maybe you've heard of the
PS/2? Maybe you've heard of OS/2 (which, by the way, I absolutely
loved)? These were attempts by IBM to bring those rogue parts of the
system back 'into the fold'.
Didn't work.
Tim Massey
