| From: | Matthew Garrett |
| Date: | 18 Aug 2000 at 00:35:22 |
| Subject: | Re: Amiga Piracy |
On Wed, Aug 16, 2000 at 05:24:35PM +0000, Ewan J Carmichael wrote:
> I'm not over sure about the history of this, but wasn't the
> first IBM PC technology cloned by a load of other companies who then
> flooded the market with their PC's because of a loophole in their
> patents? If this is the case then surely it was a form of hardware
> piracy that helped make the PC as big and popular a machine as it
> has become?
The PC was built pretty much from off the shelf parts. The biggest problem
for cloners was the BIOS, which was reverse engineered. Software patants
hadn't really been thought about too much then, so IBM's only recourse was
copyright law. The cloners claimed that none of IBM's code had been used -
evidently some of them were able to manage this.
> From what I've read, I think that the patents for Macs and Amigas
> were much better drawn up and no loopholes were found.
You could probably manage it with a Mac, but the major problem is that a
large chunk of the OS is in ROM (or used to be - it's booted off the drive
now). Amigas have large chunks of custom hardware that's easy to patant
and also rely on copyrighted OS code in ROM.
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