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IBM ESDI Hard Drive Replacement

YOUR RIGHT! I DIDNT BOTHER TO READ! Sorry @RetroAND. I guess I made the bonehead assumption we were still talking IBM Microchannel. Your looking for an actual Spinning disk component replacement.

Sorry to steal your hope away...
Don't worry, I think I panicked for nothing as under another look it seems SCSI... now I feel stupid. But there is still the matter of the System/36 it was commented a few posts before; while it still maintains my interest for long-term usage, my system works appropiately and therefore there is not the urge I have with the AS/400.

Sorry
 
"Reverse engineering" is very different from "clean room cloning". I believe that both Phoenix and ERSO did the latter. I knew a fellow who was in on the ERSO effort and he described it in detail. Really, the BIOS was copied, at least for all intents and purposes. The machinations done to get around legal technicalities was less engineering than lawyering. This is in stark contrast to the Apple Mac ROM situation, where Apple's idea was to sue everyone who even looked shady. Have the original Macintosh ROMs ever been cloned?
The guy who wrote Executor sure tried (and IIRC it mostly worked for older apps), but the coming of NEXTSTEP-based macOS made his efforts obsolete before the software could do much more than run System 6 and early System 7 apps. I forget what happened to him now, but his company closed some time ago and last I heard, Executor had been made open-source.
 
I believe that the situation early on with the Macs is that Apple refused to countenance a laptop/portable Macintosh and at least one outfit came up with an implementation. However, one had to use the ROMs from a real Apple system for the thing to work. In other words, the first laptop Mac wasn't made by Apple.

I remember seeing a pile of Mac first-generation boards for sale at one of the surplus places (Halted, Haltek perhaps). The ROMS had been removed from every single one. I've long wondered if this was Apple-mandated procedure for scrapping boards.
 
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