On Thu, 12 Jul 2012 17:04:51 +0100, Tim Streater wrote:

In article ,
Reentrant wrote:

On 12/07/2012 16:26, Man at B&Q wrote:
On Jul 12, 8:31 am, (Steve Firth) wrote:
John Rumm wrote:
On 12/07/2012 00:50, Steve Firth wrote:
John Rumm wrote:

.....
Your apparent try to portray IBM/Lenovo as champions of choice is
making me choke a little. That's IBM that would never, ever publish
to its consumers any worthwhile technical documentation for its
systems and

That's odd as the first IBM PC I camne across (circa 1982 or '83)
came with complete schematics and documentation.

The Technical Reference Manual didn't actually come with the PC - you
had to buy it separately. It included all the adapter dimensions, bus
pinouts, bus timings, and full BIOS documentation. I'm pretty sure it
even had the BIOS source code.

But you couldn't simply copy the BIOS. It had to be reverse engineered
by people working in "clean-room" environments, who would also have had
to prove that they hadn't looked at any of the docs to which you refer.

Naturally. But then many companies (Apple included) are proptective of
their IP.



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