
How Compaq Cloned IBM and Created an Empire - jonbaer
http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2014/05/the-incredible-true-story-behind-amcs-halt-and-catch-fire-how-compaq-cloned-ibm-and-created-an-empire/
======
xlayn
When you see this, and then open source you realize how giving people access
to your platform, to being able for them to be part and to drive the product
is what it makes it the winner combo. Although I'm not sure that's the case
anymore; android, apple and qualcomm they all seem to roll on the wheels of
"never a copy of it".

~~~
pjc50
It's tricky: an open ecosystem often wins, but there are certain abuses that
cannot be eradicated in an open system, and if your system becomes open you
will not be able to make a profit from it.

~~~
nix0n
I respectfully disagree. Red Hat has been able to make a profit from Linux's
dominance of the server ecosystem. I'm not sure what abuses you mean, but the
existence of CentOS (a nearly direct clone) has not wiped out Red Hat. The
malware situation for closed vs open ecosystems would be a separate
discussion.

~~~
qbrass
People who use CentOS are more likely to pay for Red Hat out of familiarity
with the OS. It's better for Red Hat if people choose CentOS over Debian or
something.

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Razengan
I'd love to see the parallel universe where Commodore never collapsed and the
Amiga kept growing in popularity and power, and Steve Jobs never left Apple
and got to push NeXTSTEP in a big way before Windows 95 came on the scene, and
where Sir Clive stayed at Sinclair Computers making ever more successful
portables...

2016 in that universe is probably a very different world, with lots of
different types of devices with different strengths, and a much stronger focus
on cross-platform protocols.

~~~
digi_owl
> Steve Jobs never left Apple and got to push NeXTSTEP in a big way

That seems like a contradiction, unless nextstep was a internal project at
Apple he took with him when he left.

~~~
Razengan
I mean NeXTSTEP could have been developed at Apple, and launched as a
Macintosh operating system. I'm not well versed in the exact history, but a
UNIX-based, object-oriented, multitasking OS released under Apple's marketing
may have gotten a lot more exposure + press, and being released several years
before Windows 95 it would have stolen some of Microsoft's thunder.

~~~
0x0
NeXTSTEP lives on as OS X to this day :) Even the base class in every API is
called "NSObject" :)

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tomohawk
Those first Compaq portables were bullet proof.

The IBM luggables were huge and unreliable. They had 2 full height 5 1/4 inch
floppy drives, no hard drive, a 4.5MHz 8086, and something like an 8 inch
amber screen that you could barely read. Basically, IBM put a bunch of parts
they didn't know what to do with into a product and tried to sell it. The only
way they could really sell them was to captive audiences like students, like
at some engineering schools.

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RyanMcGreal
My first computer was a Compaq Deskpro Portable. It had a 5 1/4" floppy drive,
a 40 MB hard drive and ran DOS 3.1 IIRC. I even wrote a custom autoexec.bat
file so it booted into a fancy menu of common applications (like Volkswriter
and BASICA). I still have the computer but am afraid to boot it up now, since
the last time I turned it on it actually booted but smoke came out of the
vent.

~~~
S_A_P
You sir, need a variac. Slowly apply that 110v/220v to your machine.

~~~
smoyer
I disagree ... older PCs are much less tolerant to changes to the input
voltage. A "simulated brown-out" might kill it completely. Electrolytic
capacitors are probably to blame for the smoke - they definitely fail with
age. The good news is that you can probably replace them since everything was
through-hole back then (as opposed to surface mount).

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bluedino
The amazing thing was how Compaq beat IBM to market with a PC using the 386.
Not surprising since they could move faster because they were a scrappy
startup unlike IBM. Compaq also didn't come up with their own bus standards
like MCA.

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yuhong
Thinking about it, it seems to be around 1991 before they were forced to do
things like cutting R&D. This would have been probably be a good time for
Intel to buy it.

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shermanyo
There's a great show on Netflix that's a fictional retelling of the engineers
reverse engineering the BIOS for their first IBM clones. Highly stylized, but
(I've only seen the first season) a fun watch.

"Halt and Catch Fire" \-
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543312/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543312/)

~~~
DrScump
There was an instruction set parody circulated around the mainframe world in
the 1980s (at least) entitled "Name That Instruction Set!" which claimed to be
new opcodes for the alleged upcoming Osborne II. It included, among others:

HCF - Halt and Catch Fire

IIB - Ignore Interrupt and Branch

PIL - Perform Infinite Loop

etc.

I can't find an exact copy, but this appears to be somewhat of a superset:

[http://www.physics.ohio-
state.edu/~bcd/humor/instruction.set...](http://www.physics.ohio-
state.edu/~bcd/humor/instruction.set.html)

Another:

[http://www.softpanorama.org/Lang/Asmorama/humor.shtml](http://www.softpanorama.org/Lang/Asmorama/humor.shtml)

~~~
grkvlt
Of course, for IBM PowerPC there was the (real!) assembly instruction _EIEIO_
which meant: Enforce In-Order Execution of I/O. [1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enforce_In-
order_Execution_of_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enforce_In-
order_Execution_of_I/O)

~~~
ajdlinux
"I would suggest re-naming "rmbdd()". I _assume_ that "dd" stands for "data
dependent", but quite frankly, "rmbdd" looks like the standard IBM "we lost
every vowel ever invented" kind of assembly lanaguage to me.

I'm sure that having programmed PPC assembly language, you find it very
natural (IBM motto: "We found five vowels hiding in a corner, and we used them
_all_ for the 'eieio' instruction so that we wouldn't have to use them
anywhere else")."

\-- Linus Torvalds, LKML
([http://ozlabs.org/~rusty/linux.conf.au-2004-emails.txt](http://ozlabs.org/~rusty/linux.conf.au-2004-emails.txt))

