Re: Piracy killed the apple. / Nathan Argument

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

"Julian Arevalo" <j-jones@geocities.com> wrote:

>Now, going back to Apple ][:
>My personal point of view is that Apple made one mistake, a VERY big
>mistake:
>They were not clone-friendly, when IBM was.

Nope...IBM fought every step of the way just as hard as Apple.
It was Compaq that finally figured out how to clone the IBM PC
by reverse engineering the chip with "virgin" programmers who
never saw the real IBM BIOS.  They worked backwards...writing
some code, seeing how software reacts, then modifying the
code agin.

Apple was successful in destroying early A2 clones like Franklin
Ace (except the IIe clones which used the same reverse
engineering technique) because they copied the ROMs illegally.
When Laser decided to clone the II, they did it RIGHT.  They
used Compaq's "virgin" reverse engineering technique.

Why did it take longer to reverse engineer A2 ROMs?  A2 ROMs
did more than IBM's BIOS.