Maybe that's true, I am not completely sure about all of Compaq's reasons, all I know is that at the time Compaq had the Bios Reverse Engineered the original Bios source was available to read.
Was it that back then program source was treated like literature, in that you could write a book and copyright it, yet I can write a book that tells essentially the same story as long as I do not use the same passages ?
Compaq did have plans for the Bois beyond that defined by IBM, I think they implemented the Bios setup menu before IBM, plus the move to a "Chipset" required changes to the original Bios anyway.
Well, except for some Compaq specific graphics cards which appear to use a well known graphics chip but differ in a subtle way such that XFree86 doesn't know how to drive them correctly.
Never experienced that myself, if you are referring to the older Deskpro series with the intergrated Video hardware, then that is quite common (changes are frequently made when usually external chipsets are intergrated into the system board. Certainly my later Compaq workstation (Which came with a GF3) has a Compaq branded card that appears to work fine with the standard NVidia drivers. As to how earlier (non NVidia) cards behaved I don't know, personally I have never found a NVidia based card that will not work with the detonator drivers.
W
HP have also done something similar with one of their Vectras which has a Matrox MGA 200 chip but fails to work at the highest dot clocks the MGA 200 will support.
On Wednesday 18 September 2002 21:57, Steve Fosdick wrote:
On Wed, 18 Sep 2002 21:54:26 +0000
Wayne Stallwood wayne.stallwood@btinternet.com wrote:
That's not exactly how I remember it :o)
IBM were quite liberal (for IBM) with information regarding the internals of the PC, Anybody could get BIOS Source code,Bus specs etc. The only reason Compaq got someone to do a clean room re-implementation of it was that they had to, in order to evade any copyright issues regarding the original Bios code...Compaq actually had to track down engineers who had never seen the freely available IBM BOIS code just to make sure that none of them accidently "copied" part of it.
I am not quite sure what you mean here about copyright issues. Possible reasons I can see for compaq wanting an implementation not copyrighted by IBM are:
- Compaq didn't trust IBM to keep the same license terms and so wanted to
avoid being held to ransome in the future.
Compaq had plans for the BIOS which the IBM license didn't allow.
Compaq though they could do a better job than IBM and when their BIOS
was finished they would have something other people would pay for.
Diversity is both the PC's greatest gift and it's Achilles heal
That could be said of Unix and Free Software too.
I'm surprised that you've had so much trouble with Compaq's and DMA, in my experience Compaq have offered some of the most Linux compatable big name machines I have seen.
Well, except for some Compaq specific graphics cards which appear to use a well known graphics chip but differ in a subtle way such that XFree86 doesn't know how to drive them correctly.
HP have also done something similar with one of their Vectras which has a Matrox MGA 200 chip but fails to work at the highest dot clocks the MGA 200 will support.
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