bios, bias

Until Apple challenged a competitor that was unartfully cloning its hardware and software, an operating system was not subject to intellectual property protections as programs were not expressive in themselves and utilitarian in nature.
IBM’s 1981 concession licensed its disk operating system to Microsoft, which in turn generalised the boot-up programme to work on a broader platform is what we usually associate with the idea of cloning and PC-compatibles. The case that Apple raised against what it saw as obvious infringement failed in three lower courts but the appeals process finally ruled in 1984 that software could be made subject to copyright and thus brought our idea of coded instruction into the proprietary-fold. At first glance, such restrictions might seem counter to innovation and there are doubtless numerous examples in the rentier economy where protectionism and clearinghouse cartels have stopped independent experimentation, in this case the new legal framework compelled both companies (other competitors had recourse to legal—now it was defined—ways of cloning the Apple through reverse-engineering) to diversify and find niche markets, scalable of course. Apple, for its part might not have diverged from the PC market the way it did had the II remained a secure technological plateau, and Franklin came to dominate the consumer market with those pocket-sized telephone directories, translators and dictionaries and arguably contributed to miniaturisation and the idea of carrying around a suite of gadgets.