Posted on 10/29/2013 10:24:45 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
After his proposal for a quick market entry via Atari was rejected, Lowe was given one year to design and produce a personal computer that would be market-ready.
William Lowe at a 2007 event marking the 25th anniversary of the Commodore 64. (Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)
(Excerpt) Read more at news.cnet.com ...
The IBM Instruments division had a machine that was more powerful at the time also.
Back later.
They tried something like that in the late 1980’s with the PS/2 with a proprietary bus. It was up there with the PC Junior in product blunders.
I think they finally broke that insanity sometime in the 1990s.
Yes, and if those laws were on the books in the 1970’s and 80’s Gates, Baller, Jobs and Wozniak would still be in prison. What a wonderful world we would have now if those thieving pricks had been locked up, right?
Just about anything “good” requires a Skunk Works type of operation, far enough away from corporate to get something done.
“What a wonderful world we would have now if those thieving pricks had been locked up, right?”
You assume they are criminals and would have violated the law to the point of being locked up. I don’t think they are the criminals you say they are. I think they would have still innovated otherwise.
P.S. Outside of IBM-PC DOS, Microsoft already was a multi-million dollar company. In fact, they were a Unix shop and a language shop. Again, I think there might have been a far more innovative market had IBM went closed design on their PC. We already had an amazing amount of tinkerers and innovators trying to make their mark.
My nephew had a PC Jr. He became the tech advisor to the office staff when he was in middle school. None of the adults could figure anything out.
Except the only difference between their innovations and theft are the words on paper called the law. Jobs and the engineers he purloined from Xerox would have had cells in the same block with Gates and the Seattle computer shop guys. And I imagine IBM and the clone makers would have been Ed Roberts’ bitches for the liberties taken with the Altair bus.
Microsoft was damned lucky that Gary Kildall was too nice of a guy and not savvy enough to fight the whole DOS issue.
At least Big Blue learned to build a proper keyboard after that fiasco. The Model M was a beast!
“Microsoft was damned lucky that Gary Kildall was too nice of a guy and not savvy enough to fight the whole DOS issue.”
Kindall signed all document of his own free will. In fact, Kindall had full authority to also sell DOS. He didn’t lose that right. Kindall had no legal claims, contrary to your assertion.
“Jobs and the engineers he purloined from Xerox”
Get real. Everything Jobs did with Xerox was legal and paid for. Xerox simply had no interest in their inventions and did nothing with them. They had every right to use them. Instead, they thought of them as junk and shared them to Jobs to use.
Your hatred of those that succeeded and got rich is well noted. Very liberal of you.
Yeah, and we’re talking about how Jobs would have been treated back then under today’s IP law. Sure, everything he did in then was perfectly legal. Today he would have been in jail for a long, long time. Oh, and for the liberal parting shot....GFY.
You're right though, the Phoenix BIOS was what made clones very possible. And it was constructed just as you stated.
“GFY.”
Just a hater of the wealthy. Been a liberal long? Probably all your life. Hated anyone that was your boss, the owners, even the guy driving a nice car down the road beside you.
“IBM PUBLISHED the BIOS code “
Yes, they did. It was part of their plant to “poison the well” of engineers that could reverse engineer a better and compatible one. Unfortunately for IBM several key players found means to not read the BIOS source code and instead used the BIOS interface specifications itself to devise what the IOS must do and let the black box guys write a new, and sometimes better, system.
It was all fun and games and people made money. Good money, too.
Been a child molester long? Probably all your life. See...I can make shit up about you, too. I would call you clueless, but that would be slanderous to the clueless of the world.
That would be DAL flt 191 which crashed in Dallas on August 2,1985 ... That flight had DOZENS of IBM’s finest from the PC development group on board ... returning from a company paid vacation in Hawaii ... that one crash could have ended IBM if a few other key players were on board .. IBM changed their internal rules regarding air travel afterwards.
http://www.airdisaster.com/special/special-dl191.shtml
This crash is one that every private pilot studies.
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