@Guestgulkan
Read the third paragraph from this link. IBM compatible PCs had existed on the market for 8 years before you're IBM PC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_compatible#Origins

Even if you had the code, you would still need to reverse engineer the it to get a spec for the clean room.

@Guestgulkan Read the third paragraph from this link. IBM compatible PCs had existed on the market for 8 years before you're IBM PC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_compatible#Origins

I know they existed, as did I.
but @1990 was when I really got one on my desk at work
and could afford to have one of my own.

*Cough*PARC*Cough*

I said pioneered. PARC may have created the technology for GUIs, but the Macintosh was the first commercially successful computer to implement a GUI. Andrew Grove may not have created the Microprocessor, but he was the businessman that spread the technology and made it successful. Steve Jobs was crucial in the movement to GUI based computers.

@Gulkan
You said you didn't think they needed to reverse engineer it and you remembered having a manual in 1990 that came with a full printout of the IBM BIOS. My point was the reverse engineering occurred 8 years prior and the internals of the BIOS weren't much of a trade secret anymore.

ascii: You said "pioneered the invention" (whatever that means. Either you invent something or you don't), not "pioneered the commercialization".

Okay, so he spread the invention, sorry if I was unclear. And while we're being nitpicky the period goes inside the quotes ;)

So you would write like this?

Lol, I think he was referring to written English grammar helios.

RIP Dennis.

Thanks for all you have done for the computer science.

@ascii & helios,
Whether or not punctuation goes inside the quotations is a matter of style.

I disagree. It's a matter of structure. Sometimes it should go inside, sometimes outside.

I'm too big of a Ritchie fan too let this thread be ruined by a grammatical argument. Let's drop it here.

I originally started typing my response, but ascii is right.

I'll leave it at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Punctuation

So many different rules o_0

This is why I study machine languages instead of natural languages....