This was very illuminating, as someone who’s wondered for a good while. Could someone direct me to resources that further contextualize the details about how this stayed so non-standardized for so long(with no solution in immediate sight?)
Might have something to do with the PC’s origin as a de facto industry standard: How the only actual IP rights IBM had over the 5150 (other than the IBM and Personal Computer trademarks) was the copyright on the BIOS. The rest of the machine was off-the-shelf parts that IBM had no ownership of. Compaq’s compatible but different BIOS won in court and that’s how we got a bunch of random vendors making compatible computers.
Funnily enough that happened during the “DIP switches for amount of RAM” era when the BIOS was pretty much entirely transparent to the user.
This was very illuminating, as someone who’s wondered for a good while. Could someone direct me to resources that further contextualize the details about how this stayed so non-standardized for so long(with no solution in immediate sight?)
Might have something to do with the PC’s origin as a de facto industry standard: How the only actual IP rights IBM had over the 5150 (other than the IBM and Personal Computer trademarks) was the copyright on the BIOS. The rest of the machine was off-the-shelf parts that IBM had no ownership of. Compaq’s compatible but different BIOS won in court and that’s how we got a bunch of random vendors making compatible computers.
Funnily enough that happened during the “DIP switches for amount of RAM” era when the BIOS was pretty much entirely transparent to the user.