Mitch Stone
MacInTouch readers William Ehrich and Bill Coleman are correct, IBM did publish all of the specifications for the IBM-PC, including the code for the ROM-BIOS. However, the ROM-BIOS remained a copyrighted feature of the PC. The company actually published the ROM-BIOS code in a manual, which was widely distributed -- but decidedly not to make it copyable. In fact, the purpose behind this strategy was to pollute the pool of outside programmers and make it very difficult for any software engineer to duplicate the functions of the ROM-BIOS and at the same time claim they'd never clapped eyes on the IBM manual. This is how IBM hoped to retain control of the PC architecture.
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