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Another American Success sold to foreign company once again. Where is the pride in the firms with Made in USA products?

The PC industry's fate was sealed when Compaq first figured out how to legally get around IBM's ROM-BIOS and started churning out clones. It's just taken 25 years or so for it to play out (although not quite that long for Compaq).

On the flip side, had nobody figured out how to legally get around the ROM-BIOS issue, there wouldn't have been a PC industry - there would have been only IBM and maybe Apple, which means PCs would cost $3000+ and it's doubtful that we'd be past 1GHz, let alone 2GHz.

Just to clarify, Phoenix was I believe the first to cleanly clone the ROM-BIOS and sell it while Compaq used it in their own machines (those of you old enough to remember, remember how expensive PCs were at that time). I'm not sure which was first to actually clone the BIOS, but Compaq and Phoenix were the first to do certain things in regards to that.

By cleanly clone (excuse my poor terminology) I mean their engineers had to be able to swear in court that they hadn't so much as glanced at the cover of an IBM PC manual or any of the specs of the IBM PCs.