Evidence receipt / uncertainty
Published · transcript-backedDavid Rosenthal: uncertainty
22 Apr 2024 Acquired Microsoft Volume I
“I know the Compaq story, but I don't know the story of the BIOS specifically. Enlighten us.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- David Rosenthal
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- uncertainty
- Recorded
- 22 Apr 2024
- Publisher
- Acquired
- Episode
- Microsoft Volume I
Transcript context
…Do you know the story of the Compaq BIOS? I know the Compaq story, but I don't know the story of the BIOS specifically. Enlighten us. It is basically why Compaq worked is what it comes down to. Compaq was formed basically to clone the IBM PC. They saw the market opportunity, and they realized they could buy from all the same equipment vendors. Let's go eat their margin is basically the plan. However, the one thing that was not off-the-shelf is the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System), which is effectively the thing that decides to load the operating system when you turn the machine on. There's some proprietary magic that happens to call upon the operating system to do its thing. Compaq reverse engineered the BIOS. The way that they did it was very similar to Trip Hawkins and the story that he told us about his reverse engineering at Electronic Arts.…
Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.