this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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Technology

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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.