"IBM PC Compatible": how adversarial interoperability saved PCs from monopolization

“IBM PC Compatible”: how adversarial interoperability saved PCs from monopolization

Interesting piece by Cory Doctorow over at EFF. I wasn’t aware that Tom Jennings, who worked for what’s now Phoenix Technologies, not only helped reverse-engineer the IBM PC ROMs, also created FidoNet.

And things are getting worse, not better: Oracle has convinced an appeals court to ban API reimplementations, which would have stopped Phoenix’s ROM project dead in its tracks.