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Comment by joezydeco | Hacker News Reader

Compaq gets credit for the first true IBM compatible PC by virtue of creating a compatible BIOS without exposing themselves to IBM's published source code. Was this also inherited from the Osborne design?

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The Osborne wasn't an MS-DOS machine but an 8-bit CP/M machine, which was the standard for generic computers at the time (Apple, Commodore, etc. had their own non-compatible systems, but you could for instance buy a Z80 card for an Apple to run CP/M on it and the Commodore 128 likewise had a Z80 built in for running CP/M besides its native 6502 and OS).

The Commodore 128 was first in 1985. But there was also a CP/M cartridge for the C64 released in 1983[1], which I think was the first Commodore CP/M compatibility play. It is very disturbing (as an old C64 user) to see CP/M running on the classic blue/light-blue C64 display.... Of course the C64 version suffered from the additional problem over the C128 version that it only had 40 text columns. Lots of other issues with it too apparently.

[1] https://commodore.international/2021/12/21/cp-m-for-the-comm... and https://www.pagetable.com/?p=1312

I don't know.

I only mention it briefly in the piece, but Osborne were already working on an IBM compatible machine (codenamed the 'Wayne') when the company went under. It wasn't one of the things Osborne himself managed to retain the rights to. He kept the 'Vixen' design and eventually released a variant of that to limited success.

As usual, Osborne had spotted the direction of travel and was preparing to adapt to it through IBM Compatibility. But by that point the company (and R&D within it) was such a mess that the Wayne wasn't very far advanced.

Wouldn't surprise me if some minor elements from its development ended up in future Compaq machines - or at least were used to cross-check their own work - but not much.

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