Phoenix Technologies Ltd is an American company that designs, develops and supports core system software for personal computers and other computing devices. The company's products commonly referred to as BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) or firmware support and enable the compatibility, connectivity, security and management of the various components and technologies used in such devices. Phoenix Technologies and IBM developed the El Torito standard. Phoenix was incorporated in Massachusetts in September 1979, and its headquarters are in Campbell, California. History In 1979, Neil Colvin formed what was then called Phoenix Software Associates after his prior employer, Xitan, went out of business. Neil hired Dave Hirschman, a former Xitan employee. During 1980–1981, they rented office space for the first official Phoenix location at 151 Franklin Street, Boston, Massachusetts. In this same time period Phoenix purchased a non-exclusive license for Seattle Computer Products 86-DOS. Phoenix developed customized versions of 86-DOS (or sometimes called PDOS for Phoenix DOS) for various microprocessor platforms. Phoenix also provided PMate as a replacement for Edlin as the DOS file editor. Phoenix also developed C language libraries, called PForCe, along with Plink-86/Plink-86plus, overlay linkers, and Pfix-86, a windowed Debugger for DOS. These products only provided a small revenue stream to Phoenix during the early 1980s and the company did not significantly expand in size. Cloning the IBM PC BIOS After the success of the IBM PC, many companies began making PC clones. Some, like Compaq, developed their own compatible ROM BIOS, but others violated copyright by directly copying the PC's BIOS from the IBM PC Technical Reference Manual. After Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp. IBM sued companies that it claimed infringed IBM's copyright. Clone manufacturers needed a legal, fully compatible BIOS. To develop a legal BIOS, Phoenix used a clean room design. Engineers read the BIOS source listings in the IBM PC Technical Reference Manual. They wrote technical specifications for the BIOS APIs for a single, separate engineer—one with experience programming the Texas Instruments TMS9900, not the Intel 8088 or 8086—who had not been exposed to IBM BIOS source code. The single engineer developed code to mimic the BIOS APIs. By recording the audit trail of the two groups' interactions, Phoenix developed a defensibly non-infringing IBM PC compatible ROM BIOS. Because the programmers who wrote the Phoenix code never read IBM's reference manuals, nothing they wrote could have been copied from IBM's code, no matter how closely