One Company Dared Compete With IBM And Macintosh Computers In 1984 | Hacker News Reader

One Company Dared Compete With IBM And Macintosh Computers In 1984

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80 pointssirteno21 comments

Ah, the Compaq Portable, one of the first IBM PC clones with a clean room reverse engineered BIOS. Phoenix did the same reverse engineering and sold it to others, creating an entire industry.

One wonders how things would have played out differently if today's legal climate pertained back then.

I believe reverse-engineering is still legal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering#Legality

http://www.chillingeffects.org/question.cgi?QuestionID=195

Not when doing DRM work. It is an anti-circumvention device under the DMCA and the "research exception" is very weak and almost worthless in practice.

.. in the US. In most of Europe for example, your ability to circumvent DRM for the purpose of reverse engineering for interoperability is protected.

Can you give any comparable examples of reverse-engineering having occurred in the last decade? It seems to me as though it's easier than ever to halt that sort of thing. For example, embed some form of DRM in the device/firmware and then the reverse engineering attempt becomes a DRM circumvention attempt. Or, embed some bit of patented software and claim patent protections.

The example that comes to mind is George Hotz's PS3 "hacking" which brought about a massive lawsuit from Sony.

> reverse-engineering having occurred in the last decade

For what it is worth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samba_4#Version_History

Samba team reversed the binary protocol for interop with Free Software, at a time when Microsoft, a convicted monopolist, was being investigated by the EU and the U.S.justice department.

This is a very specific example and I wouldn't go by it alone as a precedent.

What samba was doing has been going on long before the EU was looking into microsoft and continued afterwards...

If one were to create a phone compatible with iOS apps, would there not be a lawsuit following?

Maybe we use different laws to enforce it but the basics of what you can expect to do today are different.

I don't think they ever had ads as cool as these but here in the UK, Apricot - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apricot_Computers - and Acorn (where ARM sprang from) were competing against IBM in the same market - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Business_Computer .. sadly neither turned into a big deal, other than the ARM work, but it's nice looking back on a time when we Brits had something serious to contribute in this area of technology.

Silliest headline ever. As I recall in 1984 the world had Tandy, Leading Edge, Epson, Dell, AT&T, NEC, Atari, Commodore and countless others were all competing with IBM and Apple.

Of which at least Tandy and Commodore had been in the business market since '77.

Also, in 1984 one of the major competitors to the Macintosh was the Apple II. The Mac didn't overtake the Apple II series in unit sales until about 1987.

http://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/5/

I remember that around that time several other companies were competing with IBM. Texas Instruments made a PC-compatible machine, DEC made a (somewhat) PC-compatible machine[1], etc. And Gateway was founded in 1985.[2] There's a lot more information on IBM PC clones in the Wikipedia article on that topic.[3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_100

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gateway%2C_Inc.

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_clone

Fantastic stuff from John Cleese. Worth a viewing; a great trip into the toddler-hood of personal computing.

Say what you will about Compaq, Grid and others, actually seeing a running Metaphor Computer System in production was the same as time travel to the future.

Standing in a room full of text-based devices in 1985 and looking at Metaphor's graphical interface, wireless keyboard and mouse, ethernet backbone, laser printers, and folder-based O/S was stunning.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphor_Computer_Systems

http://www.johnweeks.com/tour/metaphor/

http://www.johnweeks.com/tour/metaphor/slideshow.html

The Compaq "Portable" was a wonderful machine in its day. I had two of them. Though they were technically "portable" when compared to the IBM offerings, they were damn heavy; I remember them being 50 to 60 lbs depending on how they were configured (single floppy, dual floppy, or floppy and a 20-40 MB hard drive). Lugging one through an airport generally resulted in far more exercise than most people would ever want on a business trip, so the old joke was, "The Compaq Portable was designed by engineers who thought if you put a handle on a refrigerator that made it portable."

I remember when laptops had handles. http://instagr.am/p/Q8sa57ovnv/

That's a luggable not a laptop.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_computer

Hello,

Funny stuff from John Cleese - The way i understand it, Compaq was competing with IBM purely on speed (the same, but faster), not dissimilar from how some folks are trying to create next-gen supercomputers nowadays. Is it possible to create a computer that beats the competition based on beauty and elegance instead (like how the Spanish soccer team plays on the world stage) ? A few months ago, I watched the Marvel Avengers Movie and in it, Iron Man Tony Stark had this little device where he flicked his fingers at a screen and this wonderful little 3d hologram of a computer popped up which he manipulated with his fingers. Anyone has any good ideas to engineer something like that ? I would love to hear and work with you on something like this - there could be other imaginative and original solutions I would guess.

Thanks a lot.

GengYang

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