> Compaq lined up venture financing–most famously from a young John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins. With this money, they quickly hired as many young programmers and engineers as they could, being careful not to poach from or anger their former employer. The key to cloning the IBM-PC was to reverse engineer the BIOS, which was the one piece of the machine that was proprietary IBM technology. But that was a tricky proposition. The BIOS had been published in the user manual, but anyone who had even looked at the BIOS code couldn’t work on rewriting it for fear of tainting the project. Running afoul of IBM’s intellectual property would doom the project.
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What our lawyers told us was that, not only can you not use it [the copyrighted code] anybody that’s even looked at it–glanced at it–could taint the whole project. (…) We had two software people. One guy read the code and generated the functional specifications. So, it was like, reading hieroglyphics. Figuring out what it does, then writing the specification for what it does. Then, once he’s got that specification completed, he sort of hands it through a doorway or a window to another person who’s never seen IBM’s code, and he takes that spec and starts from scratch and writes our own code to be able to do the exact same function.
http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2014/05/the-incredible...