Roger Oberholtzer wrote:
On Wed, 2012-05-30 at 12:30 +0200, Carlos E. R. wrote:
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On 2012-05-30 08:56, Roger Oberholtzer wrote:
On Tue, 2012-05-29 at 19:30 +0200, Per Jessen wrote:
Can't resist. First 'PC' here was a Terak running the UCSDp system. Pascal was the environment. Back in '81. Worked rather well. A home-built CP/M machine was also in the mix at that time. This was before IBM entered the area. They did not invent the PC. They just defined a very popular one.
Indeed. And documented it, allowing many vendors to design hardware and software for it. Almost an open platform.
Not sure about the 'open' part. Compaq engineers were 'sealed in a room' and had to reverse engineer it using only the machine itself. This then allowed Compaq to make their own PC machines with their own BIOS that let DOS run. I do not think IBM expected anyone to do that. If they had I am sure they could have made the task more difficult. But I would still hesitate to call it open.
Ignoring the BIOS, the hardware specs were/are pretty open, I think. The AT(X) power-supply, the (E)ISA/PCI/PCI-X bus, drive interfaces, ports, location of mounting holes, air flow design etc. A lot of those weren't just IBM of course. -- Per Jessen, Zürich (23.4°C) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org