Fed up with Chips & Technologies cloning its PC IC designs almost as soon as they came onto the market, IBM announced in April 1987 that its new range of PS/2 PCs used patent-protected proprietary technology and architectural advances that made them 'unclonable.'
By August C&T had produced a chip-set which cloned the bottom-of-the-range Model 30 (and ran 25 per cent faster).
By February 1988, C&T announced it had produced a chip-set which cloned the mid-range Model 50 (with 30 per cent better performance).
And by April 1988, C&T announced a chip-set which cloned the top-of-the-range Model 80 which ran at 20MHz compared to IBM's 16MHz.
MORAL: Nothing's impossible
You are absolutely right David, nothing's impossible.
But why do companies such as Microsoft persist in spending the time and money on Windows validation (WGA)? This technology is supposed to stop Windows being pirated, but this can be cracked and, as soon as there is an updated version, that is cracked as well.
This is good in a way because the big companies are hiring engineers to stop the pirates and the pirates (who are also engineers) are also employed to hack and crack. Hence a never-ending cycle. :-)
But, Outsider, it's good for engineer employment - at least until some clever so-and-so invents something unhackable and uncrackable. Perish the day.
I co-designed a Model 80-clone motherboard based on one of those C&T MicroChannel chipsets, and frankly the chipset was a dog. It might have been faster but it wasn't well-engineered or reliable.
We lost a bucket of money on that project. Just because you can do something, it doesn't mean you should.
Still, I did a lot of nice international travel as I whizzed around the planet sticking plasters on the dysfunctional hardware.
Thanks Phil, nice yarn. Hope you went to some good places