reverse engineer | ri-ˈvərs, en-jə-ˈnir |
When the Assyrians led the war against the Egyptians with their chariots (circa 600 B.C.), the Egyptians captured and reverse engineered an Assyrian chariot to produce new and improved chariots of their own. With this new design, the Egyptians dominated the region for years to come. Often relating to software, a classic example of reverse engineering is when in 1987 Bell Laboratories reverse engineered the Mac Operating System so that they could run the system on Reduced Instruction Set Computers.