The way I remember it, most of the clone makers of the time were scared to
death of IBM and the forthcoming lawsuit were they to use a copied bios in
a machine.
Companies like Sanyo (mbc series) and Victor (remember the v9000?) used
bios's that were Bdos compatible meaning that programs that stayed within
the DOS environment and made dos calls (such as PKZIP) would work fine but
software written for the PC's hardware would not. There were patches etc.
Kinda like the PC junior but the hardware was better....
Pheonix was the first company to release a 'clean-room' PC compatible bios
- to much fanfare as I recall. This opened the door to other makers and
thier clean-room bios products to join the fray.
As far as open architecture, ISA was very well documented and noone needed
to pay IBM to use the buss. MCA was a different story. The PC wasn't an
open architecture, but the effects were something of the same. Heck there
are ISA slots on Amigas, Ataris, etc.....
Regards,
Jeff
In <Pine.GSO.4.05.10111111318580.21847-100000(a)sundance.cse.ucsc.edu>du>, on
11/11/01
at 01:32 PM, "Francis. Javier Mesa" <javi(a)cse.ucsc.edu> said:
Speaking of M$, I was reading the other day a keynote
speech by BillyBoy
in which he claimed that DOS got such a widespread use because they
contributed with an open architecture, the PC. As far as I know the PC
was not open at all (i.e. the BIOS, etc), and most importantly the PC was
not their architecture! The key components of what made a PC a PCE were
supposed to be propietary, and most of the early clones that used DOS had
copied BIOSs which were theoretically illegal. So basically BillyBoy was
admiting that his empire was based on the encouragement of piracy by
their OEM clients of IBM's IP. Interesting, eh?
--
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Jeffrey S. Worley
Asheville, NC USA
828-6984887
UberTechnoid(a)Home.com
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