Timeline for Why did IBM make the PC BIOS source code public?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
7 events
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| Aug 15, 2019 at 11:16 | comment | added | Alnitak | @madscientist159 reverse engineering hand-crafted assembler can often be harder than doing it for compiled code (I've done plenty of both). Native assembler code is often far less modular, with the semantic intent behind chunks of code being harder to reason about than when you get lots of readily identifiable small functions. | |
| Aug 14, 2019 at 22:22 | comment | added | Davislor |
@madscientist159 One of Ralf Brown’s books talks about obtaining an OEM MS-DOS developer’s package from Microsoft that included the .OBJ files. He wrote that it was just as good as having the source code: it gave him everything but the comments. Which were probably out-of-date and misleading anyway.
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| Aug 14, 2019 at 22:20 | comment | added | Davislor | @madscientist159 Agreed. That’s what I was getting at when I said they’d have been able to disassemble the binary. Knowing the variable and label names still helps. | |
| Aug 14, 2019 at 20:53 | comment | added | madscientist159 | A little effort, yes, but in those days your source tended to be assembler anyway. It's not even in the same order of magnitude of effort as, for instance, trying to reverse engineer a complex C++ program from just the binary. | |
| Aug 14, 2019 at 7:22 | comment | added | Davislor | Having the source code surely saved Phoenix at least a little effort reverse-engineering the software. | |
| Aug 14, 2019 at 7:13 | comment | added | madscientist159 | Should be noted that this approach would have worked even without source code. IBM stumbled with the PC in the early days (remember the PC Jr.?) and users had a voracious appetite for compatible hardware. That meant the clones could hit scales that IBM simply wasn't able to handle, at least not with ramp up time, and the clean room work on the BIOS was justified commercially. Even without source code this equation would not have changed. | |
| Aug 14, 2019 at 2:20 | history | answered | Davislor | CC BY-SA 4.0 |