wrote in message
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On Sat, 8 Dec 2007 13:38:50 -0800, "Calif Bill"
wrote:

Of course everyone reverse engineered the competions code.

Obviously IBM didn't feel that way. They wrote ALL the interface code
from scratch while they were designing the interface. We stopped
publishing the CAS. In the 4341 the channel microcode was "registered
IBM confidential" and my copy couldn't leave the office unless I
logged it out. I suppose you could try to decompile the diskette but,
as far as I know, nobody ever did. In real life the technology cycle
was going so fast any clone someone made would be obsolete before it
made it to the field. 370 channel pretty much gave way to ESCON
anyway.

They did not have to reverse engineer, as there was a void before they did
it. Amdahl never made profit because after the 470 v6 about the time
Amdahl got a clone out, IBM dropped the price on their unit. IBM had
already covered their design costs, while Amdahl had to try to recover
theirs with a greatly reduced price. But IBM may have used other peoples
code in some of thier projects. ATM's were first developed by NCR, and you
have to bet IBM looked at them very closely when designing theirs.