On Saturday 17 June 2006 03:48 pm, Devdas Bhagat wrote:
we must thank him for proliferating computers and software to the masses.
Rubbish taiwanse cloners and chip fabs did that.
Actually, Compaq did it by reverse engineering the IBM BIOS, and fighting a costly court case which allowed clones.
The outsourcing to Taiwan came much later.
The Taiwanese were cloning the entire thing. Which was ofcourse illegal. They even sold boards without the bios eprom in an attempt to stay legal. U had to get the illegal bios rom seperately @ USD7~15. This was as late as 1984.
The spread of Windows was basically propelled by Windows 95 being preloaded on a large number of cheap PCs (majorly anti-competitive actions there).
Afafik there is a lawsuit pending agains M$ by BEOS. M$ forced NEC to remove BEOS in a dual boot system.