[svilen_dobrev]

things worked when there was the state behind it.. Regardless of efficiency. cm601 CPU was exact copy of motorola-6800 (with ~10% yield - doesn't matter). Pravetz-82 was Apple-][, with M6502 imported. There was even some DEC micro-VAX being copied, EC-1055 AFAIR. Then came the PC... and things went more software-ish. There was "mikro monitor 1.0" which was.. MS windows 2.0 but all in cyrillics and encodings (none in original). Xerox Ventura 2 was also copied and rev.engineered. "docs 1.0/2.x" was (pre-MS and MS) Word. Lots of other stuff. Rev.engineered and fixed/enhanced to support cyrillics or else.

Then one day it wasn't anymore.

Actually all that, let's call it borrowing, laid a perfect ground for all future versions of those products/companies - with plenty of educated and demanding users thereof.

(btw rev.engineering was good fun.. but that's a forgotten land now)

[nekitamo]

Reverse engineering was and is a lot of fun! If anything its grown in demand, you just have to make sure you’re doing reverse engineering for where the demand is. Same skills, different targets :)

[mobilio]

Well... it's complicated