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Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand, the fact almost anyone can buy a PC that runs almost any program is the result of blatant copying of IBM's machines. Even Apple caved and started selling PCs, because it turned out a unified platform has many advantages that isolated architectures don't have.

We're still stuck with the "everybody has their own designs and specifications" problem on (ARM) phones and tablets and it's affecting both operating system choice and operating system maintainability in major ways.

I dread to think of a world where software written for HP computers wouldn't work on Dells, and where Lenovo's wouldn't be able to run Microsoft software. Developing software would just be needlessly expensive and annoying.

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Exactly, if IBM hadn't lost control over the PC, the world would look very different today. We'd probably be stuck with very expensive "professional workstations", Linux probably wouldn't have been created, everything would be closed and tightly controlled platforms like game consoles or mobile phones are today, hardware as a whole would most likely be behind 10..15 years because of lack of competitive pressure (see the messed up PS3 design which was a result of the old "closed platforms" thinking).

I think there's a very solid case to be made that "illegal clones" are actually good for progress.

PS: there's also this interesting take that Germany's quick industrialization in the 19th century was mainly driven by ignoring British copyright law:

https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-...

> On the other hand, the fact almost anyone can buy a PC that runs almost any program is the result of blatant copying of IBM's machines.

The PC was made with off-the-shelf parts; only the BIOS is copyrighted and, as analog31 said, IBM published the source code and schematics. That's not the same thing as condoning "blatant copying"; IBM went after clones with infringing BIOS. Most, however, followed Compaq's example and used clean room techniques to build their own, or purchased the Phoenix and other BIOS made the same way.

Almost all Apple II clones of the type described in this video infringed on Apple's intellectual property. The only exceptions are a) the Laser 128, and b) the post-lawsuit Franklin models.

My impression when the IBM PC came out, is that they intended to create an open system. They published the schematics. They encouraged anybody to create hardware and software. Their BIOS was copyrighted, but others came out with compatible BIOS's that were not owned by IBM, and that's what triggered the flood of clones. By the time that PC's reached the 386 level, IBM wasn't driving the bus any more.

The Apple II was an open system, but creating a compatible BIOS that wasn't a copy would have been impossible -- even for Apple, because of widespread software that made creative uses of the variables and entry points in the firmware. the Mac was intended to be a closed system.

IBM simply followed the tradition created by the companies already in the microcomputer market. Apple's documentation, for example, included the full schematics and the source listing for the ROMs:

http://cini.classiccmp.org/pdf/Apple/Apple%20II%20Reference%...

You could get similar documentation for all Radio Shack products and many others.

MITS didn't set out to make their Altair 8800 an "open system". In their case it wouldn't make sense not to have the full documentation for the customers that were building their own machines from kits. But this resulted in clones and in competitors rebranding their "Altair bus" as the S100 (standard 100 pin) bus and making improvements to it as a group resulting in MITS losing control. So IBM should have known what would happen, but probably thought they were too big and important for history to repeat itself.

>I dread to think of a world where software written for HP computers wouldn't work on Dells, and where Lenovo's wouldn't be able to run Microsoft software. Developing software would just be needlessly expensive and annoying.

Having a Wintel monopoly hasn't been great for customers though.

I've always thought that one of HP's biggest failures was ceding control of their platform to Microsoft.

Having a Wintel monopoly hasn't been great for customers though.

Really? Would the PC industry have been as successful -- and its products as widely accessible -- if left up to Apple and a dozen expensive almost-but-not-quite compatible Unix clones? I think not.

IBM made the PC open because they were operating under a consent decree for being a monopoly in mainframe and other parts of the IT market.

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