[Coco] Just a thought

[Theodore (Alex) Evans]

On 03/26/2015 09:20 PM, Hugo Dufort wrote:
> The whole "PC compatible" (also called "clones" back then) industry
> started when IBM let other companies reverse-engineer and create

There was no *let* involved.  At the time copyright law permitted 
reverse engineering if done properly.

> machines that were equivalent to their own de-facto standard. The most
> important parts of the standard were the CPU, the ISA bus
> specifications, and the BIOS functions/interrupts. CDP reverse-engineer
> the BIOS and soon enough, the specs were "public domain"-ish. It didn't
> take long before the industry started pulling in all directions, but
> standards emerged and they even started working together (VESA
> standards, etc.) Without this rather "benevolent" attitude from IBM, the
> PC/XT platform would have been "closed" and the PC industry would never
> have bloomed.

Most of this was because IBM considered personal computers to be a fad. 
  This is also the attitude helped the original IBM PC to be such a pile 
of crap.  It had two things going for it, it looked like a serious 
machine and it had the IBM name on it.