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Fair point. Compaq in 1980's is probably the best case for reverse engineering and building a robust system. In some cases it out performed IBM PC's.

However, I have to admit, reverse engineering a home desktop is different from a airline software, considering that bugs can instantly kill people.

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Also, if you rebuild a system in isolation, you have to reproduce all the bugs - since you do not know which of the bugs are load-bearing, i.e. other systems have been engineered to depend on the bugs, whether by accident or intentionally.

Absolutely correct. (cough) javascript at Microsoft.

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