Re: [OT] Free Software Company

[Babu Kalakrishnan <kalakrishnan@xxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Sep 18, 2000 at 03:35:34AM -0700, dodobh@xxxxxxxxxxx typed:
> >
> >At the first place, PC came from IBM, they only hired Bill Gates to
> >write an operating system for this PC.
> They hired Bill Gates because the person(s?) who was originally
> supposed to write the OS decided to play golf than meet the IBM
> representatives :). Bill Gates licensed DOS to demonstrate to IBM,
> because he didn't have an OS available then.The rest is history.

True - The president of Digital Research (forget his name) - riding high
on the success of CP/M - didn't believe that IBM was really serious in 
stooping down to making lowly PCs !! 


> >Secondly, IBM allowed to clone PC by any number of other companies
> >that resulted in the proliferation, price fall, and ultimately 
> >widespread usage.
> That was not IBM's benevolence, by any means. Compaq reverse
> engineered the PC BIOS, and went on to win a court case against IBM,
> with the court ruling that reverse engineering was legal.
> IBM published the BIOS specs only after that.

That's incorrect. Though not bundled with the PC itself, the Technical
Reference Manual for the IBM PC was available from IBM (for a price)
even with the first release of the PC. The manual had full source code
(Assembly listing) of the BIOS, full hardware / interface details of the
PC bus as well as complete circuit schematics of the system. I probably
have a copy of it (bought in 1984 or so) lying around somewhere.. It was
a wonderful document.. I did learn quite a bit from it.. (IBM deviated 
from their *fully* open source BIOS philosophy with their next release
the PC-AT though - I remember that all copies of the PC-AT Tech.Ref.
manuals had a few critical pages of BIOS source missing - the area of
code that dealt with the secret of how they managed to switch the
machine from protected mode to real mode in the INT 15 interface :
something which was physically impossible as per Intel's design of the
80286 processor).

IBM made the machine open because they were trying to emulate the huge
success of Apple II (which was an open system). But sadly Apple's next
releases Lisa (?) (and later Mac) were both closed systems, and Apple did
pay the price for that.

The compatibles market was actually started by Texas Instruments who
made a much better machine based on the 8086, but it was badly received
because of incompatibility issues. A breakaway team from TI who believed
that compatibility was more important than technical superiority founded
Compaq, and released the first "really' compatible PC and the rest is
history.

IIRC Compaq won the court case based on the fact that they hadn't
actually borrowed any code from the BIOS source published by IBM. (But
they managed to be compatible enough to such an extent that even the
addresses of the BIOS entry points were the same as those used by the
original IBM PC)

Kala