25 Apr
2007
25 Apr
'07
4:53 a.m.
Warren Wolfe wrote:
Imagine my surprise when DisplayWrite would not
even run. Seven
million for a study, and they didn't bother to even set it up. Sheesh.
Anyway, I ended up talking to Mort Myerson, the V.P. of EDS within a few
minutes, and I explained the situation to him. He said he would take
care of it. In the meanwhile, I was using a debugger to try to find out
what actual problem was causing the failure. It turns out that
DisplayWrite checked the BIOS ROM, and if it did NOT find "IBM" it shut
down. I figured we would get IBM to change the program... but, no.
Within a couple of hours about five Bell Labs techs showed up asking for
me, and got to work on the BIOS. I explained what I had found, and they
verified it. They then re-assembled the BIOS with a nonsense trademark
notice about IBM, and started cranking out copies of the new chip.
DisplayWrite then found "IBM" in the BIOS, and was happy.
Hopefully you're not blaming the AT&T 6300 for that mess... I think the
"IBM-string-in-the-BIOS-check" by the software is completely arbitrary
and the real dunce of the story...
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/
Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/