Five years ago today Apple changed the world of smartphones and mobile computing forever.

[jmowreader]

31. PCs for the masses were because of Phoenix Technologies

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Technologies

In your computer is a program called the Basic Input/Output System, or BIOS. It is the program that tells your computer's microprocessor it's in a computer rather than a traffic light, a dishwasher or a brake system. And for the first few years of the PC's existence, the only 100-percent IBM-compatible BIOS available was made by IBM. There were a couple of problems with this, one being that real IBM PCs were expensive, the other that real IBM PCs were only available from stores IBM thought good enough to sell their products. You couldn't walk into Kmart or an appliance store and buy an IBM PC. (The flipside is, the stores IBM thought good enough could actually fix the damn thing if something went wrong...not that much COULD have, since a Genuine IBM PC was built like an anvil.)

There were other computers that ran MS-DOS, but those "compatibles" ran only software that was coded very strictly for MS-DOS (which meant it couldn't directly call the hardware, and all the good DOS software does that) or software that was made specifically for your model of computer.

Phoenix Technologies decided to make a version of the BIOS that wouldn't infringe on IBM's copyright. They formed two teams of engineers: one had access to the IBM programming manuals for the PC, and they wrote specifications for each thing the BIOS does. They handed these specifications to the other team, who were chosen because they'd never read the IBM documentation. The second team wrote the BIOS.

Without this software, no PC clones could have been made and without it Windows wouldn't have been successful--anyone who could afford a $5000 piece of equipment could also run it from the command line.