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IBM's Purple Book and Open Source
Bill Kendrick writes: "I noticed a ZDNet article titled "Why we should hail IBM's ode to open source--the Purple Book". It compares IBM's open release of the classic PC's hardware and BIOS specifications with today's OpenSource model and Linux." Shortly after IBM's open-spec PC, they reverted to the closed PS/2 with a patented bus in an attempt to monopolize the exploding market. Hopefully this particular bit of history won't replay itself.
"Shortly?" The PS/2 was launched in 1987, I believe -- six years after the IBM PC. That's about a bazillion computer-industry years.
These guys have taken the ball and run with it, as far as Linux is concerned, but let's not deify the group that brought us Microchannel architecture in a move to regain absolute control of the market. Working with IBM in Linux development is good and important, but don't lose sight of their history as a megacorp bound on dominating everything in sight. The only reason they aren't still doing it, is a bigger, meaner and more evil company came along.
I gotta get a tight tension on...
In reading through Bill Gates' book The Road Ahead he mentioned the oft cited problem of IT in the old days: men in white lab coats being intimidating and that folks really wanted computing power for the people. In his recount of the deal of the century (the selling of MS's brad of DOS to IBM for their about to be released PC) he mentioned that he had to convince Big Blue to open the specs for the PC. Hence the reverse engineering done by TI/Compaq was made easier by none other than Bill himself since he was so into openness at the time. At least that was his recollection of how things transpired.
Hopefully, this little bit of history will replay itself.
.NET framework. They're putting the squeeze on, in an attempt to lock it all up once and for all. Hopefully the market will respond to .NET in the same way it responded to MCA: evil empire loyalists may adopt it, but everyone else will go running to some other, non-empire-controlled, open standard(s). J2EE, Linux, it's all there and it all works.
IBM took an open standard (the ISA bus) and tried to take it closed (the MCA bus) so they'd put an impenetrable lock on the market. The industry responded by saying "to hell with you, IBM; we're all going to EISA (and later, PCI)." Who's playing the close-it-up game now? Microsoft, of course. The Internet currnently runs on open standards, but Microsoft's 'MCA bus' is the
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If I remember my history correctly, the original IBM PC was open-spec only because they didn't have enough time to come up with something proprietary. They wanted to monopolize the market from the start, but they were running behind and had to get something out so as not to lose the market entirely. So, I don't think we have to worry too much about this piece of history repeating itself because their push for openness isn't motivated by time pressures this time (at least I don't think it is).
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THE PURPLE BOOK "contained the hardware schematics for the IBM PC as well as the code listings for the ROM BIOS," Dave Bradley, one of the machine's 12 original designers, later explained to me. "It contained just about everything you'd want to know if you were going to build a device that would plug into the IBM PC."
In the Purple Book, as Bradley said during the panel, "We told all the PC secrets."
IBM wasn't the first personal computer maker to spill its guts. Apple published the source code for its Apple II. Atari and Commodore also offered similarly extensive documentations. But for Big Blue, a company that built a dynasty on proprietary products, the Purple Book represented a break with tradition as almost as radical as Martin Luther's breach with the Holy Mother Church.
WHY DID IBM SO WILLINGLY bare the soul of its new machine? Bradley again: IBM wanted to "make it as simple as possible to design hardware and software that would work with the PC."
"We wanted the software and hardware industry to participate."
Participate they did. What's more, the Purple Book made the IBM PC easy to copy, and thus, in came the clones. The result: A de facto standard was born, and that standard made way for the widespread deployment and use of PCs. The rest, as they say, is history.
The historical significance is the parallel that exists between the Purple Book of yesterday and the open-source movement of today. The comparison isn't a perfect one. The Purple Book did not constitute a license for use; IBM retained intellectual property rights.
Whatever! The retaining of intellectual property rights is ther whole point. What they did is what everyone else who had attempted to put out a PC would have to do in that era. The subset of technicians working on these technologies was quite small- small enough that a collegial flow of information was necessary even to drum upo interest in one's hardware.
So what IBM was doing was trying to raise itself to a playing field which Apple and Commodore had already delineated; to break into a technological community which was already occupied with other hardwares, it had to disseminate technical information.
There is a parallel today; Geron, the company which licensed the technology to extract stem cells from blastocyst-stage embryos, dissseminated the technology, advice and support to institutions of learning, retains commercial rights to any salable products that come out of these laboratories - or even the precursors of those products.
Then and now, such a technique is to take advantage of an academic desire for learning, or a desire to help the sick, and commercialize its output.
There is really no choice for software developers in the Microsoft world, or for stem cell scientists outside the apron of federal approval, except to sell their first-born breakthroughs to loan sharks.
I've said it before and I'll say it again; capitalist systems cannot sustain innovative energy or scientific responsibility.
Goat sex free since 2001
IBM also imitated Apple in keeping the ROM BIOS source code closed, and making it legally difficult for anybody to reverse-engineer it.
I thought that at one point you could get a large book, from IBM, with the complete, commented, assembly source for the PC BIOS. I understood that is was intended as a resource for programmers, not reverse-engineers, but that it formed the basis for some of the early (CompaQ?) clones...
I could be making this all up, but I don't think so...
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Simply put. Microchannel was great. The biggest problem was the stupid reference diskettes, and that was simply because flash memory wasn't there, yet.
Microchannel machines simply worked longer and more reliably than ISA or even PCI machines.
The problems was the stupid #$%& licensing terms. Gotta separate the technical side from the idiot marketing side.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
and licensing their technology. IBM has more patents every year than any other company. If I am not mistaken, the PS2 architecture was ahead of it's time by having devices speak directly to the processor and memory speeding things up. I also believe IBM opened the PC spec up to put down the monopoly abuse cries from their trials. If memory serves, IBM put alot of companies in business.
IBM was just following in the footsteps of the Apple ][ computers which provided complete schematics for the computer in the manuals. The Apple ][ pioneered multiple expansion cards and an easily openable case, and here IBM realising what a good idea it was also folowed suit. Too bad Apple sometimes forgot those concepts.
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blinko - "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down"
Just like it says here...