Who were the worst of the worst?

On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 10:38:56AM -0800, Fred Cisin wrote: In the early days, some companies were afraid of getting sued by IBM (while most of them were totally fearless), so they'd go out of their way to add stupid incompatibilities. I put together a machine (on a rackmount panel) based on an Eagle 1600 motherboard, back when they were dumping those cheap, and it was close to useless. I had to patch the BIOS to work with a normal FDC board (IIRC they'd pointlessly changed the DOR layout), and while it was nice that using an 8086 instead of an 8088 bought some speed, the fact that they didn't account for that in the (8-bit-only) ISA bus interface broke most software that touched the screen etc. ... since the high halves of all word accesses were lost, so you had to special-case your code accordingly. More recently, clones have been great. Whenever people ask what hardware to use to run my stuff, I say cheap no-name junk is the way to go. All those guys have going for them is compatibility! It's the big names who like to have gratuitously unusual hardware or write their own not-quite- vanilla BIOS, and that's where things get nasty. John Wilson D Bit