Re:Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster
by hakfoo on Sunday August 16, 2020 @04:24PM
(#24180958)
I think they made a commented disassembly available officially, and there were definitely aftermarket books with blow-by-blow analysis.
You could argue it was imperfect (not exposing every feature it could, and having performance costs, sent a lot of software to bypass it and pound hardware registers directly, creating that weird world of early clones that would run MS-DOS but not 1-2-3 or Flight Simulator) but it doesn't seem like a hostile gesture to external developers.
Now it was definitely a legal hurdle if you wanted to make an outright clone, but by 1984 or so, Compaq and Phoenix had solved that problem.
You could argue it was imperfect (not exposing every feature it could, and having performance costs, sent a lot of software to bypass it and pound hardware registers directly, creating that weird world of early clones that would run MS-DOS but not 1-2-3 or Flight Simulator) but it doesn't seem like a hostile gesture to external developers.
Now it was definitely a legal hurdle if you wanted to make an outright clone, but by 1984 or so, Compaq and Phoenix had solved that problem.