硅之牛仔Silicon Cowboys Movie Script

What we knew was that ibm had come Out with a product that was made with off the shelf components.

A personal computer, like any other computer, Is just a nothing box full of electronic switches And hardware.

Rod canion:

They hadn't designed a new disk Drive or a new processor.

Anyone can buy all this stuff off the shelf right now.

Rod canion:

This was stuff that everybody in the industry Was using some form or another.

Except the chip.

Except what's on the chip.

Steve flannigan:

Without ibm code it wouldn't run.

It is the program, it is the magic.

Rod canion:

We sent gary stimac to dallas to buy some manuals.

Gary stimac:

I purchased an ibm reference manual, And it had all the listings of the ibm code in it.

Rod canion:

He says, whoa, this isn't hard at all.

Bad news is they copyrighted it, and they own how it works.

Gary stimac:

I circled the word copyright, Brought it to the my lawyer, and he said, hmm.

Jim harris:

What many of the companies were doing was They were copying ibm's code.

Guess what, ibm sued them-- out of business they were.

Good news is there's a way around that, sort of.

We needed to make sure that we did Not shoot ourselves in the foot from a legal standpoint.

I said, gary, you can no longer write the code Because you've looked at it.

In fact, you can't answer questions about the code.

You're going to have to find a different job here at compaq.

Steve flannigan:

You can never look, you just can never look.

If you look, and it influences your work, Then you can be open to a lawsuit and you've copied it.

Gary stimac:

No one in the entire office Could ever buy a tech reference manual Without me removing the pages and me destroying them.

Charles lee:

We had to basically create a functional device that Would do what the ibm pc did without knowing How the ibm pc did it.