I, Cringely | The Pulpit "Small corrections, since Jack was no longer involved after 11/80: I did the first version of ROM BIOS for delivery of the first prototype to Microsoft on Dec 1, 1980 (Ballmer answered the door when we showed up), but it was extended and revised through April of 1981. We published more than the interfaces for BIOS -- we published the entire assembly code listing (it took me a week to edit it into a single file for publication) and the entire schematics for the hardware in the Technical Reference Manual. I've always thought we did that as a way to get done quickly, rather than trying to write an architectural specification of the interfaces."



Thanks to Dave Bradley's thoroughness, then, Compaq, Dell, and the other IBM PC cloners today have a $400 billion global business.