The Rise and Fall of the IBM PC Part 2: Attack of the Cloners
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- čas přidán 14. 04. 2019
- In this second installment of the Rise and Fall of the IBM PC series, we will be taking a look at the rise of the IBM Compatible clone market and how it seized control of the IBM PC standard away from IBM itself, relegating IBM to just another PC manufacturer. We cover events up to IBM's decision to release OS/2 and the PS/2 line of computers, which is where the next part will pick up.
I would be remiss if I did not mention the enormous help that Jeff Duntemann (a man who went head to head with Bill Gates in programming and is an expert on legacy computing) was in helping me understand just what the BIOS did on legacy PCs and how it interacted with the OS and the hardware. He was kind enough to respond to not only answer my questions regarding the BIOS, but also gave me a massive amount of useful information, some of which will be appearing in future planned videos.
#IBMPC #OldComputers #Documentary
Credits:
BIOS Information
starman.vertcomp.com/asm/bios/...
www.minuszerodegrees.net/5150/...
OS/2 Logo
By Source, Fair use, en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?...
PC-DOS
By Source, Fair use, en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?...
5150 Motherboard
By German - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
TRS-80 Model III
By Bilby - Own work, CC BY 3.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
Sanyo MBC 550
www.old-computers.com/museum/c...
TRS-80 2000
computer_collector.tripod.com/pics/vintage/trs802k.jpg
286
By Konstantin Lanzet (with permission) - CPU collection Konstantin Lanzet, received per EMailCamera: Canon EOS 400D, CC BY-SA 3.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
Phoenix Technologies Logo
By Source, Fair use, en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?...
Compaq
By Rama & Musée Bolo - Own work, CC BY-SA 2.0 fr, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
Interrupts Process
By Stephen Charles Thompson (anon_lynx) - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
Roadside Stand
By Stephenson, Al, Photographer (NARA record: 8464474) - U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Public Domain, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
#documentary - Zábava
4.5K views is a travesty because your production values and the content within is top top notch. Wow this was a great series.
Glad you enjoyed it!
The algorithm just recommended these vids to me and I would have never known it had less views, if I was sent to it there may be hope it will start getting better visibility.
In my case it was actually the video on the history of Windows, nowhere do I ever think I'd find anything that came close to that sort of depth, especially for something Windows pre Windows 3. These and the NextStep video were a bonus
Appreciate the kind words, glad you enjoyed the videos!
The narration is barely audible over the music and no one wants to hear the same song played over and over for 27 minutes.
I seriously was thinking the same thing.
I ran a small team that created a cloned BIOS in the mid 80s. It was not as hard as you indicated - 4 of us did it from scratch in about a year. We used a lawyer reviewing our work throughout. The biggest issues were applications looking for specific bytes in the BIOS rather than calling routines. The only way to discover this was by running a large library of systems then using a logic analyser to work out what was going wrong. But really it was laborious rather than technically hard.
Did you ever get it to market? What happened?
@@user-zb9lv3gh8s yes it was used in our line of systems
He said that though. Laborious.
In addition to clone PC manufacturing, there was a boom in clone hardware sold separately. I was able to build an AT system in 1988 for $500 with parts from JDR Microdevices. I still have the screwdriver that they would always send with the parts! JDR=Jeff David Rose, smart individual who found a niche in mail order catalogs for electronics hobbyists.
I still do that.
Great video but the music loop is annoying. Please no music in next video
Appreciate the feedback!
My first PC was a Compaq Deskpro with 2 5¼ drives, a Hercules color video card, and a Princeton monitor.
This is REALLY good. Fantastic detail and point of view that most of the others retro computing players don’t mention, like the Phoenix HUGE role in the clone industry. Really looking forward for a #3.
This is timeless material. People will start catching this up.
Glad you enjoyed it! These videos take a lot of time to research, but it's such a fascinating subject and very enjoyable reading (my personal physical library of computer history books has reached over 100 books on its own, there are some really niche works out there that have material that cannot be found anywhere else).
You are absolutely right, Phoenix really is the secret sauce in the rise of the cloners. Compaq may have cloned the PC before them, but Phoenix kicked down the gates completely and made it possible for anybody to buy 100% IBM compatibility. Don't forget Chips & Technologies though, while Phoenix made it possible to clone the IBM PC, C&T made it possible to do it extremely affordably.
Part 3 has been delayed slightly due to my day job requiring more of my time, the script is mostly complete and I am shooting for a late September release. Its going to be the longest one yet in the series, probably well over half an hour long.
Another Boring Topic , really good stuff. Hope you make it. I can only imagine the effort involved. I truly hope that it also becomes a video that picks up the views it deserves. The good thing is that iT’s not a time sensitive topic. Series is really good and time will make justice to it.
Given how slow our production process is, we have to stick to topics that we can take our time with ;)
@@AnotherBoringTopic I could not agree any more. Just use what you got, and get what you want. As far as what I know in doing a big project, nothing takes long. Everything takes time.
I agree - Phoenix plays a very understated role.
I was a teenager back at this time, so I didn’t know the background. I just went to windows and dos. When I looked at os2, I wanted to believe, but I just gave up with all of the problems that ibm didn’t understand. Great video!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Excellent content and presentation. Thank you. My only criticism is the background music - it is too loud and probably unnecessary.
Glad you enjoyed the video and thank you for the constructive criticism! I realized after a few videos that the computer history videos really do not need music, and so I pretty much quit using it entirely
@@AnotherBoringTopicThank you. The information is amazing, but that music makes me want to stab my ears out.
Your narration is clear, concise and to the point. This Part 2 show is as great as the Part 1.
Appreciate the kind words, glad you enjoyed it!
@@AnotherBoringTopicThank you very much. This is not another boring topic. Instead, it is an interesting topic. I hope the desktop computer will not become obsolete.
amazing video ! those 'chips available from other manufacturers' were the bones of ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI... crazy how a different decision or a different valuation creates an entire ecosystem
Thanks for the compliment, glad you enjoyed the video!
Minor correction at 17:01 while the compaq portable was an 8088, the original deskpro was a true 8086 chip (also running at a higher clock speed). Something that made it superior to the PC&XT.
9:54 Also a note that the BIOS was not handling “interrupts” as such (there was no support for interrupt-driven I/O in the BIOS or in MS-DOS). It’s just that BIOS functions were invoked via an instruction called “INT”, which stood for “software interrupt”. It was a way of invoking code where the entry point was not at a fixed location-something you would do in lieu of having proper relocatable shared libraries as in more advanced OSes.
your views dont do justice.. top quality videos, comrade
Appreciate the kind words!
How does this only have 40k views? These videos are fantastic.
I'm not a computer industry person, but I am incredibly fascinated by the evolution of the home computer market, mostly thanks to "Halt and Catch Fire"... its wild how IBM's failure to see the future cost it billions of dollars that it was perfectly placed to reap
Thanks enjoyed a lot! Altough suggest using an alternate background music half-way through as the same song looped gets a little tiring.
I'm loving your content.
If I may, please lower the background music by a lot in future videos. It is distractingly loud.
Cheers.
Love the video! Great work, great watch and looking forward to part 3!
Glad you enjoyed it! :)
@@AnotherBoringTopic I too am looking forward to your next video!!
Thanks! I’ll give a hint, the next video is actually going to explore a different computer company that no longer is with us today but was hugely influential all out of proportion to the roughly 50 thousand computers they sold 😁
Profound depth in this series. Thank you for the videos.
Thank you for the compliment! Glad you enjoyed them :)
What if?
PS/2 failed mostly because it was simply released too late. Same for OS/2. If IBM work faster, and release the new "standard" sooner, let's say in 1985 when it was still a dominant force in PC market - things might went better for them.
Imagine a world when we had an IBM PS/2 computers, similarly how we're buying Macs at this point.
I can't believe how little information there is about the Phoenix back engineering job. As someone whose first computer was the TI-99/4A (sporting a TMS9900) I am intrigued that the software engineer's experience was only on that architecture before tackling the BIOS for IBM clones.
Agreed, that guy played a hugely pivotal role in creating the massive PC juggernaut of the 1980s and none of my sources even mention his name. What else did he do? I can't imagine he retired after his success with the BIOS, he must have been busy with other projects afterward and I bet there is a really neat story that I would love to tell.
I'm betting that he was deliberately kept obscure in order to protect him in case IBM tried to go after him directly.
@@AnotherBoringTopic I figured along those lines as well. I'm going to ask around in some online forums to see if more light can be shed on the topic. I'll be sure to post back. Thanks for putting this very well done documentary together - been thoroughly enjoyable B)
Please do, I’d love to hear back if you find out anything!
And I appreciate the compliment, glad you enjoyed the series!
"There was no standard." Yes, there was. Not in America but in Japan, Kazuhiko Nishi together with Bill Gates formulated a computer system based on Spectravideo hardware with standard hardware, a standard bios and a standard basic. It's called the MSX system and many Japanese and Dutch manufacturer Philips made different models, all compatible with each other. Later models even had a sort of stripped down version of MS-DOS, called MSXDOS.
You bring up an excellent point, while North America and Europe were still mostly a disparate mass of systems with varying degrees of compatibility/no compatibility, the Japanese (plus the markets the MSX was sold into, although it was mostly sold in Japan) had the closest thing to a standardized computing platform. I actually had never heard that MS-DOS ran on it though, that's very interesting.
Thanks for watching and commenting!
@@AnotherBoringTopic It is not exactly MS-DOS, but a lot of commands are the same. GW Basic and MSX Basic are highly compatible. For more information en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX-DOS. I still have a MSX machine. One of the last produced by Panasonic, a MSX Turbo-R FS A1 GT.
Thanks, I came to say this. The MSX was like the PC but for home computers. Even the latest, the Turbo R, was backwards compatible with the original MSX.
Good comment.
BTW, I've always wondered what a Fair definition for the word 'standard' with relation to computer platforms would be. This comment inspires this thought: 'a software platform supported by 2 or more competing companies, even if it doesn't take over the wider market'.
Which means, of course, that the PC wasn't a standard at all until the first Clone appeared.
Great video. We had an IBM PC junior at home, it brings many memories thank you
Glad you enjoyed it!
At around 14 mins the music started driving me insane and I had to bail out
I love this series because it reminds me of the lectures my hardware repair prof gave me.
Glad you are enjoying it! It’s definitely a fascinating topic and I’m doing my best to do justice to it, with at least 2-3 more videos in this series planned.
Non clone MS-DOS machines still had to implement their own BIOS in order to run the OS and applications. The reason Lotus 123 and Microsoft Flight Simulator wouldn't run on such machines was exactly because they bypassed the BIOS for performance and directly accessed the hardware, which had to be 100% compatible with the IBM PC.
8KB of 8086 assembly was not a big deal for early 1980s programmers. The "clean room" approach from Compaq and Phoenix was sufficient to avoid IBM's lawyers, but it was not necessary. IBM sued several cloners who copied the ROMs bit by bit, but dropped the suits if they changed things even if the programmer had carefully studied the published sources.
9:48 The ironic thing is that more advanced OSes (like OS/2 and later, Linux) make little or no use of BIOS calls, other than perhaps for basic hardware enumeration early in the boot process. The clone-level compatibility was needed because apps themselves were making direct BIOS calls, to get around limitations of MS-DOS.
I didn't realise the BIOS had ever played such a part in running the PC. I thought it was just to boot the machine from cold and then hand over to the OS.
Another wonderful doc! Cheers, mate!
Many thanks for these three videos and the massive amount of information they provide! As someone who grew up in this era and worked with these machines, from TRS-80 over Apple ][ and Amiga to PC and even PS/2, I very much appreciate the insight they gave me. Thumbs up!
Glad you enjoyed them, thanks for the like!
That's a very interesting video you have, very explanative and understandable.
Glad you enjoyed it!
AWESOME VIDEO! THANK YOU! Subscribed.
Glad you enjoyed it and thanks for the sub!
Why use loud background music to spoil the valuable content?
awesome story telling - some good books mentioned to add to the list too
Glad you enjoyed it!
I am really enjoying these, with a gentle suggestion. Please reduce the volume of the music track with respect to the commentary track. In this one, the music was distracting due to its volume.
Thank you for the constructive criticism, I really appreciate it!
I believe this is the last video I made that has background music, I thought I absolutely HAD to have it, but I eventually realized that my videos were better off without it.
I remember Phoenix Tech. They also did a PostScript clone that was widely used in printers because Adobe's licensing and development fees were extremely high.
The PS/2 line had a new bus, as was stated. However, many systems relied on the old bus. Hence, when I started work, the company got Dell computers bur the OS/2 operating system. There had to be standards, which is how we got RS-232 and RS-422 standards, among others.
Absolute awesome I have worked at the Hartford for 36 years and didn't know they had a place in the pc history with Phoenix bios 😳😀
10:17: Actually, on an original IBM PC, there was no visible RAM count displayed. That only became common and de-facto standard behaviour later, at least with compatibles. The original IBM PC just showed a blinking cursor and emitted a single beep if all was well, and then booted DOS, or went straight to ROM BASIC if DOS was absent.
I remember some Olivetti PCs in our office in the late 80s which were not quite 100% compatible and we would get weird little differences running Lotus 1-2-3 and other programs on them.
Was the bios cloning proces featured in halt and catch fire,the tv show?
Could you update the description with the book sources used please I'd be interested in reading more
Thank you so much!
The original Compaq DeskPro had an 8086, not the 8088. The Compaq ran at 7MHz by default (if memory serves) but would downshift to the IBM standard 4.77MHz via keyboard sequence.
Loved watching this (I worked for Olivetti when they were becoming a cloner). But the dreadful background ‘music’ (almost random notes!) is painful
I’m glad you enjoyed the video in spite of the music! Back when I did these videos I was still operating under the assumption that I HAD to have some sort of background music…finally I just dropped using music entirely and so far I think the consensus is that doing so was a vast improvement ;)
@@AnotherBoringTopic Thanks for the reply! I'm loving your 'way back then' series! I understand the music - just starting to CZcams myself, and got lots to learn!
Please ditch the irritating background music in your next vid, Part 3. After 27 minutes, I could hardly concentrate on your narration, because of that syncopated jarring jazz loop you use, which makes my skin crawl and seems to get louder by the minute.
That's a shame for me, because I like this period in the computer industry, and you are a great storyteller, Mr. Boring. You keep it to just the right amount of detail, and you have a pleasant voice style I could listen to for hours. You talk like a real person - you neither drone on like a college professor, nor have a fake sing-song style like Doug DeMuro.
I wish CZcams provided a button I could click to toggle off the background music, and just play the voiceover audio.
I really appreciate your taking the time to give such detailed feedback about what worked and what didn’t work for you. The ultimate judge of the channel content is you the viewer, so your feedback is absolutely taken seriously.
There have been other comments in a similar vein on the background music before, I actually did away with background music entirely in the most recent computer history video, the one on Steve Job and NeXT, but that video still has too few views for me to know if no background music is the way to go, versus different/better background music.
At the beginning of the year I did take out a subscription to Epidemic Sound so I could move away from CZcams’s stock music and have a much bigger library of music to choose from.
Part 3 has been delayed yet again due to my day job taking up all my available time, but the script is substantially complete and I should be recording the audio soon. I will bear your comments in mind as I work on it, if I can’t find music that works well, I may just release it without any background music at all.
Again, thank you for the constructive criticism, I really appreciate it :)
@@AnotherBoringTopic
Dear Mr. Boring: I really appreciate your taking the time to give such detailed feedback about my feedback about the music track in your above video. I listened to the background music again, and it is maybe not as bad as I thought the first time I watched your vid all the way through.
I'd deleted my comment before you responded to it - my comment came off as far harsher than I wanted it to be, and far harsher than you deserve. It's a great series, and having now finished it, I really enjoyed it and learned heaps about the 1980s PC market and IBM's slow decline. You clearly did some really in-depth research, the production values are good, and I really like the inclusion of so many contemporary ads, magazine and newspaper articles, computer catalogues and so on that are relevant and add context and make the video visually interesting. That part about the BIOS *is* egregious, but on rewatching it, it wasn't quite as bad as it seemed the first time around. It was definitely repetitive, but it seemed worse than it actually was because it followed a long segment where you restated a bunch of facts that you already covered in Part 1. It kinda lost me a bit, but even if I didn't like it or agree with it it's a valid editorial choice, and I don't have standing to be second-guessing your choices, which in any case still resulted in a great series that left me feeling much more informed than I was before coming across it. I particularly liked the explanation of how Phoenix Technologies cloned the BIOS.
Thanks for your labours mate :)
I honestly didn't take the comment as harsh at all, but I appreciate the kind words!
I expect to get feedback both positive and negative, its just part of doing videos. The positive comments tell me what I need to do more of, and the negative comments tell me what I need to do less of. Both are useful feedback and are an important part of getting better and growing as a creator :)
A few quibbles:
(1) Every IBM PC came with a manual showing all the calls into the ROM BIOS. So it wasn't "reverse engineering" to mimic it, it was plain forward engineering.
(2) And it wasn't particularly difficult engineering, the calls were very simple: put a function code in AH, parameters in BH,BL and other registers, and do an INT 21h. And get the programmers to sign a piece of paper stating that they never looked at the actual ROM code or the ROM listing supplied with every IBM system. In reality, they HAD to look at the IBM code, to ensure they intentionally did things slightly differently but with the same results.
(3) The IBM BIOS and video card BIOS's were not very well written. Many apps, including Lotus 1-2-3 would instead call their own video and keyboard routines in order to get like three times the video and graphics performance. So the clone hardware had to not only present an identical BIOS, they had to mimic every minute aspect of the motherboard and video card, even the glitches.
26:11 Not sure if the original plan was for IBM to completely control OS/2. Remember that, when it shipped, there were two versions, “Standard Edition” which Microsoft would license to other PC makers, and “Extended Edition” which had extra, IBM-only features.
Any updates on part 3. These videos have been fantastic
Glad you are enjoying them! The Rise and Fall videos are a lot of fun to make, but they are the most time consuming of any of our videos. Right now it looks like Part 3 is still about 4-6 months away as there are two videos ahead of it on our production schedule. One is being edited right now and the other one is almost done being scripted.
Another Boring Topic thanks for the reply. Well I’m subscribed, and I’ll be here waiting. Great content by the way.
Quick update: Part 3 is now in full production and should be released in about 2 months or so. :)
Another Boring Topic can't wait, great balance on content depth and presentation!
Glad you enjoyed it!
The topic is not boring enough to warrant background muzak. Came here after watching part 3, which didn't have it, and the muzak is quite distracting and a bit too loud. Would be a good idea to reup with no music
Most channels with small sub counts make terrible videos as they get their sea legs. This is quite good, looks like a lot of research went into editing and topic research. Good video, consider me invested
Glad you enjoyed it! I was somewhere around 3-5 hours of editing per minute of finished video, and I have another 2-3 videos planned in this series directly. Hopefully we can keep improving the quality per video, comments like yours are a great encouragement to keep plugging away at it!
Looking forward to it, i appreciate the effort involved
Nitpick : I'm curious why you're referring to to the 8088 based IBM PC as a 16-bit standard when it was a bus throttled 8-bit standard. - I mean yes, the cpu had parts of the 16 bit architecture of the 8086 - but the design outcome was an 8 bit computer from the user's perspective (much in the same way as the 68000 was a 32 bit capable chip - hobbled by a 16 bit bus on the original Macintosh). Still an awesome series tho (hence why this is merely a nitpick).
It's mostly a matter of semantics, but I have always felt that the 8088 was most accurately described as a crippled 16 bit processor, rather than a jumped up 8 bit processor. It is after all a crippled 8086 which is a full 16 bit processor. Probably a distinction without a difference since, as you point out, to the user it behaved primarily as an 8 bit processor but I wrote the script so I picked the verbiage ;)
Unfortunately the background "music" finally drove me away after 22 mins. Pity.
I remember circa 1992 purchasing an IBM PS 2 with the famed, micro channel architecture, which altogether cost $10,000. About two years later it was worthless.
great stuff...background music is distracting.
The number of views are likely kept down by the abysmal choice of background music. It turns what would've been a pleasure trip into an almost unbearable chore.
Damnn so Compaq was the Giant in Halt and Catch Fire
I have only seen the pilot episode of HACF, so I am not terribly familiar with it, but if any cloner deserved to be called a giant, Compaq did. 111 million dollars of sales in its first year (a start-up record at the time according to Accidental Empires, Page 173). And they were fast, with great engineers as well. They cloned the 286 AT in only six months, then beat IBM to market with the first 386 system (other cloners then cloned Compaq's 386, not IBMs).
When IBM tried to force a new architecture (the PS/2/Micro Channel) onto the industry that was incompatible with the existing ISA standard, Compaq led the other cloners in coming up with a rival (and backwards compatible) standard that wound up (with the exception of the PS/2 port, which hung on for mice well into the 21st century for some reason) becoming the new standard.
Compaq was an innovative, smart, and very disruptive player in the 80s and 90s, and had a good reputation for offering a high quality product at a good price.
@@AnotherBoringTopic Yeah in the show they rewrite IBMs bios word for wordby measuring the I/O signals with an oscilloscope? And then somehow translating that to hexeecimal, with a bunch of LEDs on a breadboard. They then get a coder to rewrite the Bios without looking at the code, while IBm is threatening them with a lawsuit. The giant becomes a cheaper faster clone of IBM. So I guess it's an idealized version of Phoenix and Compaq. Very interesting stuff. Your documentaries are very interesting for your ability to cover a myriad of information, while discussing it through a paradigm of not only tech, but the business side of it which played as just an important it seems.
Thank you for the compliment, its always encouraging to hear that somebody enjoyed these very niche documentaries :)
You bring up an excellent point, which is that the business side is just as (if not more so) important as the tech side of things. Smart business practices can make an otherwise average product like MS-DOS extremely successful while poor business practices can make an otherwise extremely well designed product like the Amiga a market failure.
The 1980s are full of tech companies that had innovative products, but poor business practices and as a result have been defunct for decades. I plan to eventually cover a number of them (such as Digital Research, MITS, and SSI).
The real Clone Wars
Apple’s 1984 Orwell campaign hit a sore spot with many computer users. Not everyone was ok with being under the thumb of an uncaring behemoth. If it wasn’t for the cloners, we would probably still be running 80486 architectures.
10:53 in, on the computer screen you show a calendar and you type "Will anybody actually read this". Well i did :-) hahah
In 1983-84, Commodore sold more computers than Apple and IBM combined. I've seen the numbers crunched from several different directions, but none that dispute this basic claim. Even the numbers in this video for the PC's early growth pale in comparison to the most conservative Commodore estimates for the same years.
That makes the first part of this video and its insistence that IBM was ruling the roost from the word 'go' rather confusing. The C64 is still widely quoted as the best selling single computer model of all time. If this guys claims of IBM's Instant Revolution is true, why wasn't it the 5150?
A more mainstream view would be something like: 'The IBM PC rather instantly took over the business market, but struggled in the home computer market until VGA came around in the late 80s.'
How big was the IBM's BIOS?
The irony of that Apple commercial has always amazed me. Jobs and Gates were both A-holes perhaps but Gates was a businessman and now he is a total egomaniac and Jobs was a visionary without good enough business sense who denied the identity his own daughter for years.
"The BIOS is not an operating system"... ehhh, by several pertinent definitions, it is. ;-) Thanks for the video.
The BIOS _could_ be part of an OS, if the OS made use of it. Trouble is, no OS that is even a bit more advanced than MS-DOS would do so, because the BIOS doesn’t even support interrupt-driven or multithreaded I/O, for one reason.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 You can diminish what the BIOS does as much as you like... all OSes use the BIOS. Mostly for bootstrapping and device addressing. It may not do much, but it's doing something, thus a very bare bones operation system.
I remember when OS/2 caused problems for some supposedly-IBM-compatible machines. This was because, unlike MS-DOS, it tended to address the hardware directly using its own drivers, rather than going through the BIOS.
Drop the background music.
I can't say what IBM did were wrong or bad from the way to protect its business. If they try to run as a startup, quality and brand trust would go down, which would give more reasons to go with the cheaper clones. IBM trying to create PS2 and OS2 can also be viewed as a reasonable step. They could build something new and better and not leave it open to be cloned. I think what IBM did not do, or could be called a mistake, was that it failed to see the cloner as legitimate designers on their own. Compaq, Dell, and others put in their money to design new systems and improvements. They did not just make identical IBM machines, but also made better ones. That's why when IBM abandoned the IBM compatible market, Dell and Compaq did not end as if nothing to clone or copy from. They actually picked up the IBM compatible torch and made faster and better PCs on their own.
You could've called it 'The Clone Wars,' man!
I can't believe to think of Microsoft as the good guys in this case.
Ah, irony. :) But I do thank the team who developed the IBM PC that made personal computers possible. I grew up through all of this. My first computer was an Acorn System 1.
The cloners were partly esponsible for the clone wars, wiping out the Jedi and IBM
The background muzack is a little distracting and annoying.
Its a fascinating history but the video needs better chapter markers.
Good informative and visual video buddy. But can you change the background music once in a while? Yuck! Distracting. Oh,and it’s pronounced “per - rif -er - els”.
Glad you enjoyed it and I appreciate the constructive feedback!
I definitely mangled “peripherals” pretty badly every time I pronounced it, in every video 😂
I still don't understand why Mr. Gates would name his company after his nether regions
And I thought Apple were greedy... hoping for a part 3 :)
Glad you enjoyed it!
Part 3 is in production, but probably won’t be done for another 6-8 weeks. It’s a big script, probably going to be the longest of any of our videos so far :)
@@AnotherBoringTopic Amazing quality video! I was giving up hopes that a new series was coming, glad to know it's still in production. Looking forward to it, and subscribing to be notified!
As usual I badly underestimated how long it would take to produce a video. Probably won’t be the last time either unfortunately but I trust the wait will be worth it.
I recorded the audio for part 3 a few weeks ago, and I’ve been editing it ever since. It’s the longest video I have ever done, well over 40 mins long.
I also built a new editing system (Ryzen 9 3900X) and switched to a full Linux (Pop!OS) setup for video editing, which delayed things a bit further.
Appreciate the sub!
@@AnotherBoringTopic Really happy to know that whle late it's still being produced and I have no doubt it will be worth the wait. There are not many youtubers out there that have the knowledge and willingness to go into such detail.... I have watched quite a few videos on similar subjects with a lot of approximations or confusion, while your videos are extremely well researched (that's probably what takes so much time, among other things...) Your videos deserve a lot more views, but it's also true that they suit an audience of initiated people and therefore can not be really viral (that's maybe also why you ironically called you channel another boring topic, even if it's far from boring to people interested in the subject). Having said that the IBM videos seem to be the most watched, so there is definitely some interest, even if it's probably not from the masses of teenagers and other people born in this Millennium that flood youtube, but more from people like me who were born over 40 years ago and maybe had an IBM as their first pc... (mine was an IBM PS/1 from 1992, a 286, among the lowest end in their range but also the best I could afford at that time...).
@@AnotherBoringTopic I've just got hands on another Xbox 360, and wonder why there are so few topics on it. A console so rushed to the market that it would kill smaller companies without M$ infinite pocket deepness. A 68% failure rate during quality control, I think five or six revisions of the original "fat" model, angry customers, lawsuits and $1,15 billion cost for just thermal paste modifications. I love the console, have two Slims and a Jasper (latest Fat) on its way. Still it's such a tragic history.
10:50 yes
Of course I read it.
Good video, but the music gets on my nerves :-)
I absolutely love your content, but the music is a nightmare!
Too loud, the loop too short.
Thanks for taking the time to comment with some constructive criticism, I really appreciate it!
When I started making these videos I thought I absolutely HAD to have background music. But eventually I did figure out that my videos are better without it, so only my older videos have it :) all part of trying to make each video better than the last.
Jonathan
@@AnotherBoringTopicI also found really off-putting. It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't that annoying artsy music with the out-of-time feeling.
Well informed account, but go a bit easier on the graphics. You don't need to put up a different graphic for everything you say, like putting up the IBM logo every time IBM is mentioned. We know what it looks like.
Very interesting, but an occasional dip in the annoying sloppy timed muzac volume now and then to give my ears a rest would have been a welcome upgrade. Seriously, the music is terrible.
Wait a sec... Thought Columbia Data Products was first to market with a 100% IBM PC compatible, (MPC 1600), reverse engineering the IBM BIOS before anyone else....
edit: Yep, Columbia beat Compaq to market by several years.
Awesome job correcting that, thanks! I need to do some research on them, it’s odd that none of the sources I used when I made this video a few years, mentioned them at all.
@@AnotherBoringTopic I only remember because my family nearly bought one, but instead waited a bit and got a Leading Edge
Interesting story but seeing the same graphics over and over again was really annoying.
An interesting video ruined by the worst music mixed way too loud. Did no one listen to this before releasing it?
How about all the clone motherboards from Taiwan ? Many small companies built their own systems with Taiwan parts as well as other components from the likes of Tall Tree Technologies.
I don't think any of my sources mentioned Tall Tree Technologies, were they Taiwan based?
One of my sources, Robert Cringely's Accidental Empires, mentions that Chips & Technologies didn't build their own fab faculty, they leased unused space from what he refers to as "chip makes with edifice complexes" (Page 180) who had overbuilt their semiconductor faculties. I'm assuming the cloned motherboards were also a part of this, as they would have needed the BIOS and whatever C&T chips were available in order to be competitive.
Were these chip makers primarily in Taiwan? Or were the cloned MOBOs made using other companies' parts, with Tall Tree Technologies simply assembling a Phoenix BIOS, a few C&T chips, and whatever other components could be sourced locally and packaged as their own motherboard?
Appreciate the comment!
@@AnotherBoringTopic TTT made a long card which was a HD buffer marketed as a "disk accelerator". Compared to the regular PC HD in/out a PC with this new concept "HD buffer" blew their socks off. I believe thay were in CA. Great work!
@@AnotherBoringTopic see: PC Mag - Sep 3, 1985 - Page 108 - Google Books Result
Very interesting! I see that they were also advertising AT compatible memory boards, any idea if these were as high quality as their disk accelerators?
@@AnotherBoringTopic I never used their Mother Boards. I did use other MBs , all advertised in Computer Shopper. It was thick with ads - like a phone book of yesteryear. They were all good.
At that time RAM prices soared.
No music pleas
There was in fact a standard for personal computers, and it was very good, and popular, maybe not so in the USA and that doesn't make it less important: MSX!!! It came with Microsoft MSX Basic, and it was very good. Even a few game franchises were first developed here, such as Metal Gear. How come you dismissed this?
Justice was more complacent at that time. Could you image apple let competitors reverse engineering its iOS ?
Some of the issues back then were due to the confusing legal status of software protection and patents. Remember that even in the 1980s, the boundaries were not very clear on what was and wasn't permitted. Lotus and Borland even wound up in court in the early 80s as Borland had put out a product that closely mimicked the "look and feel" of Lotus 1-2-3 to aid user adoption of Borland's Quattro spreadsheet. In the 1980s, IBM (and Apple) relied heavily on their ability to "lawyer up" and drag things out in court until the other party ran out of money(see: Apple's lawsuit against Digital Research's GEM GUI) far more than the actual law itself.
But isn’t that what the Chinese do to American products? And even here in the US I’m not sure I have a problem with how they reverse engineered the BIOS. They had to come up with a completely new way of doing something with no knowledge of how IBM’s system worked. I applaud them. That guy for Phoenix had to be unbelievable smart. I’m just adding to your thought, not trolling you. Interested in your opinion to this though.
Hum sure they were clever but could you image some company running a compatible sw to mimic iOS having a different type of sw coding.?
Interesting comment, especially in regards to China. When is something "inspired by" versus "ripped off"? When is something the product of R&D (research and development) versus R&D (rip-off and duplicate)?
The Chinese frequently just outright rip off intellectual property, something that has been a source of complaints for many years. Witness all of the "Apple" stores in China, that are complete phonies, but are so similar to the real thing in every respect that it is not possible to tell the difference, or the Apple phones over there that are visually identical to the actual iPhone and run a skinned version of Android that mimics iOS.
I would argue that this is completely different from what both Phoenix and Compaq did, which is to reverse engineer the functions of the IBM BIOS, but with completely original code. In light of your comment, it's ironic that the term for the separation between the programmer and the ones writing the specifications is "chinese wall". :D I have nothing but respect for Compaq and Phoenix, they worked very hard, in very intelligent ways, to gain an edge on one of the world's largest companies. They not only did it legally, I would argue they did it ethically.
The legal principle for what is allowable and what isn't, at least in the USA, was mostly set back in the 1980's, although it definitely is still under constant refinement and challenge, see the years long legal proceedings between Apple and Samsung that wasn't resolved until 2016. A lot of current debate around this issue really boils down to interface/physical design of a given product, can one thing be mistaken for another?
That's where the whole "look and feel" aspect comes in, although it is definitely a bit of a gray area. After all, ReactOS is still going strong, with no problems from Microsoft. Granted, free software tends to be given a far easier pass than for profit software.
Great content but that horirble background music is distracting
Ibm and xerox were first and created literally everything, then came pirates of silicon valley and stole
Of course if only IBM got gates to sign a contract saying he would only sell\distribute DOS and any other future compatible software to IBM. From IBM point of view, too bad. from average user, Thank God!!!!
"Will anybody actually read this"-- yes, yes I did
Hmm i thought the kernel did most of the work the Bios did..
On older systems, the difference between BIOS and Kernel isn't so pronounced. In an email to me from Jeff Duntemann (a veteran programmer with the singular distinction of beating Gates in a programming competition), he said the following in regards to the IBM BIOS:
"The important thing is that the BIOS was more than just the startup code. DOS was *constantly* making software interrupt calls into the BIOS, especially for disk management and display/keyboard/printer functionality. This helped make software interoperable under DOS, and software developers did not have to write their own primitives for everything."
I do know that the kernel under DOS (MSDOS.SYS) was quite busy, but I believe it focused more on files and managing programs while the BIOS dealt with interpreting system calls to the hardware. The Wikipedia for the kernel has quite a bit of good information on what it did en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSDOS.SYS
@@AnotherBoringTopic Ohh okay very interesting. That's very cook you programmers around this time to elucidate this kind of info.
Wrong. There was MS-DOS compatibility, and IBM compatibility. The difference lay in the choices application programmers made. MS-DOS compatibility meant that any application that used MS-DOS system calls for writing a character to the screen, reading from or writing to storage, and so on would run properly.
What your video fails to explain is that programmers quickly found out they could get better performance writing directly to the hardware, instead of using MS-DOS system calls. Problem is, just about every popular application (including Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft Flight Simulator) bypassed system calls to write directly to hardware. That's what made the difference between MS-DOS compatible (a "well behaved" program) and IBM compatible. That's when the BIOS issue kicked in. Many early systems (such as the Tandy 2000 you mentioned) was MS-DOS compatible, but not IBM compatible.
Compaq used a similar black box approach to developing its own BIOS as you described for Phoenix. The coders didn't know what the actual IBM code was, but they could look up the specs and find out what went in, and what came out. Award was another early BIOS manufacturer.
IBM's MCA architecture wasn't designed solely to re-establish dominance, but recognized what became known as ISA (Industry Standard Architecture) was quickly falling behind advances in memory & cpu speed, not to mention video & hard drive performance. ISA was too slow and too narrow. What was wanted was a 32-bit system with bus mastering where the cpu wasn't doing all the heavy lifting. An early choice was EISA, as favored by Compaq and some others. MCA was another, and PCI was a third. The latter won out because it wasn't proprietary and was open source. MCA offered many benefits, but IBM was a little too concerned about control.
I like being bored.
Glad to be of service! Thanks for watching and commenting :)
Just a small note, the word peripheral is pronounced puh-rif-er-uhl. 😉
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Please guys, just change the channel name. I don't see any other hindrance to views apart from your channel name. Use another name, it's painful to know from a viewers side how deleterious the name is with all the exhausting hard work that you guys have put into these videos. Change the name and icon to something more attention grabbing or at the very least neutral
We are discussing alternate names, but haven’t come up with anything solid yet unfortunately.
7:14 sorry but this animation is terrible. Who did this, could never see IBM PC in real life...
Part of producing the best content possible is taking feedback, both positive and negative, so I appreciate you taking the time to watch the video and post a critique :)
The music ruins this video