David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Yes. Compaq had two engineers. One engineer went in and fully dissected the code for the IBM PC BIOS, basically saw all the proprietary calls that it made, and documented each of those calls without writing the implementation steps. Then he handed, hey, here's what the BIOS needs to interface with, over to the other engineer. The other engineer, on their own, just went through and thought of an implementation. They have no idea if it's the same implementation, so it's not breaking any infringement. They're basically saying, I'm just seeing the requirements for this product, and I'm coming up with my own implementation of that product. They basically figured out how to exactly clone the IBM PC and buy the very same operating system. To go back to quoting Ben Thompson because this is from his great piece again, "The result was a company that came to dominate the market. Compaq was the fastest startup to ever hit $100 million in revenue, then the youngest firm to break into the Fortune 500, then the fastest company to hit $1 billion in revenue, and by 1994, Compaq was the largest PC maker in the world." The Compaq story is amazing. The three people who start Compaq in 1982 are actually Texas Instruments engineers who left, and they wanted to start a company. I believe as the legend goes, they were trying to decide what to start. They were considering a restaurant chain and a bunch of different business ideas. The IBM PC comes out at the end of 1981 and they're like, oh, we can clone this and do everything, the story you just told. It's wild. They start the company in 1982. Within the first year, they do $111 million of revenue of selling IBM PC clone hardware. And is it just cheaper? Basically this is the IBM PC, but for less money?…

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