[geeks] Anyone know of good sources of 5V DIMMs?

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Mon, Jun 19, 2006 at 10:18:28PM -0400, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> It's really too bad that IBM didn't license PS/2 architecture, or at
> least MCA, to everyone.  It took the rest of the PC world about 7 hears
> or longer to fully catch up to what MCA busses and motherboards could
> do.


The y tried to. What happened is that they published the specs of the PC,
so that anyone could make expansion cards. Since the BIOS was copyrighted,
they assumed no one would copy the machine itself. Some companies made
"compatibles" such as Compaq, how compatable is another story.

Then someone sat an engineer in a "clean room" and they reverse engineered
the BIOS. That allowed the "clones" (direct hardware copies) to work, but
no one ever cloned the BASIC interpreter ROMS. M/S later sold that as
part of M/S DOS (GWBASIC).

When they went to sell licenses to the PS/2 technology, they wanted a per
unit fee which was quite reasonable, but they also demanded a per unit fee
for every PC compatible or clone the company had made.

Several companies were willing to pay the fee for the new machines, no one
was willing to pay the fee for past products.

Geoff.

-- 
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