🚀 go-pugleaf

"Andrue Cope" <not.a.valid@email.address.sorry> wrote:
> I'll finish with this final thought:Where would we all be if IBM had
> been able to prevent the BIOS [heck PC] cloners from marketing and
> using their product? I bet PCs wouldn't be as plentiful, cheap and
> standardised as they are now.

I agree with your thoughts (as I understand them) on reverse engineering.
The last adjective (standardized), however...

I believe that PC's would be much more standardized than they are now.
Consider that there has never really been a successful clone market for the
MacIntosh, and it is quite standardized.  In contrast, there are more
expansion interfaces (USB, Firewire, Serial, Parallel, PCI, IDE, SCSI,
Serial ATA, DIM, PCMCIA, DIMM, SIMM, AGP, etc. etc.), brands of components
(ATI, Tyan, Supermicro, Via, Intel, AMD, Creative, Lian Li, etc. etc.), and
vendors in general, than you can shake a stick at for the PC world.

With MacIntosh, it's the iMac and, well, the iMac.  (If there are any Mac
zealots out there waiting to point out the various Mac flavors, I know they
exist, and that there's a bit of diversity there, but nothing compared to
the more open world of the PC.)

The drawback for the PC, from Apple's perspective, is that because the
(many) standards are implemented by many vendors, there are going to be a
lot of incompatibilities.  And there is some truth to that.  I recently
bought an "ATX" motherboard that didn't work with a standard (one might even
say high-end, considering the price) ATX power supply.  I ended up getting
an "Extended ATX" power supply just for that motherboard :/

On the other hand I also had the option of telling the motherboard
manufacturer to take back their mobo and then go to a competitor.  If I
encounter any incompatibility with a Mac, I can buy a new Mac or live with
what I have.

So even though I think they would be more standardized had IBM prevailed, I
also think they would be generally inferior and the customer would have been
worse off.

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