• entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org
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    11 months ago

    I don’t know anything about Compaq. Was their business built on reverse engineering IBMs system and impersonating IBM hardware to gain unauthorized access to their servers and services?

    It was actually even more hardcore than that. They reverse engineered IBM’s BIOS to create the first fully compatible non-IBM PC that could run MS-DOS and all IBM PC software natively. Then they won in court after proving they didn’t copy any of IBM’s source code and that the people who programmed the compatible BIOS had never even seen the original documentation for the IBM code, let alone the code itself.

        • helenslunch@feddit.nl
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          11 months ago

          They reverse engineered IBM’s BIOS to create the first fully compatible non-IBM PC that could run MS-DOS and all IBM PC software natively

          This doesn’t sound like anything that’s dependent on IBM servers or services. It also doesn’t sound like something that IBM could realistically fix easily and retroactively, which is the case here with Apple.