24 Jan
2004
24 Jan
'04
6:12 p.m.
On Sat, 2004-01-24 at 11:20, Curt vendel wrote:
Is Pheonix really first? What about Compaq??? Did
they produce the first
PC clones? What BIOS did they use, is it what Pheonix became?
The early Compaq's were NOT fully IBM PC compatible.
Hell, I had a multibuss MSDOS machine that did all the main int 0xxh
calls that PC BIOS suppported, including "memory mapped video", on my
TVI terminal. Real compatibility was hard.
There were all sorts of weird copy-protection schemes that relied on
strange side effects of the IBM PC to work, like absoluete execution
times and other horrors that made it all difficult. This is the stuff
that PSA solved. THey earned their money.