[Gllug] Re: Gates to get Knighthood!!! (Andrew Halliwell)

[Christian Smith]

On Thu, 3 Mar 2005, Rob Crowther wrote:

>Bruce Richardson wrote:
>> Rubbish.  IBM and the clone manufacturers brought computers to the
>> masses.  Maybe you are too young to remember.
>>
>Surely it was the company who did the first rip off of the BIOS?  The
>whole clone industry was built on the back of that.  Without that we
>would have been enjoying proprietary IBM hardware, and M$ would always
>have been under the thumb of Big Blue?


No, without an 'open' BIOS, the IBM PC would not have been ubiquitous.
That they did ship documentation and the source code to the BIOS enabled
people to 'rip it off'. Very un-IBM like at the time, but it was still
IBM that created this market opportunity.


>
>Rob
>

Christian


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