6 Jun
2023
6 Jun
'23
11:25 a.m.
There were a articles in the more technical journal-type mags 1981/82 that
discussed porting IBM DOS to non IBM 8088 systems that go into the
mechanics of it. DOS v 1.25 was the OEM version for the early ports.
*indirectly* from these you might find references to IBM BIOS porting and
who did it, there. I have only print copies no scans.
Bill
On Tue, Jun 6, 2023, 2:03 AM Chuck Guzis via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
wrote:
On 6/5/23 22:28, Tom Gardner via cctalk wrote:
Can anyone identify a PC-DOS compatible PC
announced earlier than
October 1984? Citations would be greatly appreciated.
That's a tricky one,I think. For example, if a single programmer read
the IBM PC BIOS listing (or even disassembled it) and then wrote a new
one from scratch, that derivative BIOS in the view of the IBM legal
beagles would not have been legal.
If, on the other hand, the same programmer never saw any of the code,
but read the API description and wrote a BIOS, that would be legal.
Both ERSO and Phoenix resorted to a "clean room" method where one team
read the PC BIOS and wrote a description, which served as a
specification for a derivative BIOS. I think that the descriptions were
cleaned up a bit and published as the Phoenix BIOS books.
But I think the first "clean room BIOS" was in the Columbia MPC-1600,
June 1982.
--Chuck