response 1 of 60:

Jul 28 10:58 UTC 1991

They've got to be hung up legally.. I've never even heard of them. ;)  I
thought IBM was the only machine that could be cloned (although I have seen
those apple II compatibles)

response 3 of 60:

Jul 28 15:19 UTC 1991

What I read was that they were going to be hung up in legal problems 
because they had to prove that the OS they developed was entirely 
different in origin and separate from Apple's.  To accomplish this they
went to extreme measures...If you ever worked for Apple in any way you
could not be hired.   I just can't seem to remember the name of the 
company.

response 5 of 60:

Jul 29 01:27 UTC 1991

When a Mac Emulator was released for the Amiga, the only way it could be 
done was to use Mac ROM's in it.  This has proven to be quite popular with
Amiga owners, as the 'AMAX' Macintosh emulator works 110 percent.  Of course,
it can be pirated by putting the ROM's on disk, but we all know that is
illegal.

response 7 of 60:

Jul 29 05:57 UTC 1991

 No, it's not slow at all.  You read them into memory once and be done with
it.  The emulator program just reads them from the hardware gizmo you stick
on the parallel port anyways (maybe the serial port, I don't know..)  It's
not like you stick the Apple ROMs onto your Amiga motherboard..

 One of the Mac clones was going to use Motif as its windowing system
instead of Apple Finder-style windows.  It looked sort of interesting,
especially since Windows 3.0 looks a lot like Motif, making this machine
look like a Mac running Windows 3.0.

response 9 of 60:

Jul 29 11:51 UTC 1991

I know of one company that makes an industrial version of the Mac.  Since
Apple will not sell them the motherboard separately, they have to buy SEs,
rip the motherboard out of them, and then repackage it.  Gets the job done,
but I think Apple is kind of silly to make them jump through hoops to do this.

response 11 of 60:

Aug 1 19:19 UTC 1991

It is still rather silly.  They could license the use of the motherboard
very restrictively.  (They probably will do so, sometime soon...)

If the company that reverse-engineered System 6 wins its legal battle,
Mac will license System 6, making their technology (which will not be
100% compatible) undesirable.  (In fact, Apple is already talking about
licensing System 6.  I don't know about System 7, but wouldn't hold my
breath...)

response 13 of 60:

Aug 2 09:01 UTC 1991

IBM isn't actually such a special case -- the architecture of the 68000
is just as open as the intel 86 family.  Maybe more so (ever try to read
Intel documentation?)  Hardware types do tend to prefer the intel chips,
but more because you can step them slowly and watch them work --
motorola tends to go for more synchronous designs -- either it works
just right or doesn't work at all and you can't slow it down to see
what's happening.

Used to be that most of the software for a computer existed in RAM --
still true for the IBM today (the bios is not really all that
sophisticated a program-actually just barely enough to get the machine
running).  It was also true of Apple's machines -- in fact, there were
several companies cloning the Apple ][, such as Franklin.  There were
also a lot of people making apple 2 hardware.  And, for slightly larger
machines, there was a very wide open S-100 market.

With the Mac, Apple tried to get rid of those people -- the original Mac
came with absolutely no slots, and a lot of software in Rom.  All those
hardware companies quickly switched over to the then new PC, and it
quickly became the case that you could either buy cheap disk for the PC,
sometimes buy similar disk for the Apple ][ from the same company, or
buy very expensive disk from Apple.  Most people bought PC's, of course,
and Apple was in serious trouble because of that.  Probably one of the
major all-time marketing failures, that was.

Software also went through some interesting quirks.  Digital research,
who had been very successful with CP/M, really didn't keep up with the
times.  MS-DOS quickly took over the lead for PC's.  But CP/M was
actually much more intended for small businesses, and what really took
over from the S-100 CP/M systems, were small multi-user systems.  Often
multibus, usually C, frequently Unix, and the 68000 did quite well here.
And digital research just didn't do so well when the best it could offer
was a really terrible C compiler and various versions of MP/M and CP/M.
Let's face it, MP/M is really really primitive as timesharing systems go
-- and DRI didn't seem to have whatever it takes to keep its clients
happy.

response 15 of 60:

Aug 31 22:19 UTC 1991

NewTek (if memory serves) is the name of one particular company doing a total
"clean-room" approach to cloning Mac ROM's...and they supposedly have deep
enough pockets to survive Apple's school of legal piranha, anticipating a
"burn rate" of $2-3 mil a year. They MUST have deep pockets, as they are
offering to indemnify (from Apple) ANY company willing to bring the first Mac
clone to market, suing NewTek's technology. More later, film at 11.

response 17 of 60:

Sep 2 00:36 UTC 1991

Wrong NewTek...but I'll pull out tht magazine article just to be sure. You ARE
correct about the Toaster guys...Tim Jenison, author of CoComax 1 & 2 (not 3)
is indeed one of the principals in the Video Toaster gang.

response 19 of 60:

Sep 4 10:55 UTC 1991

Last I heard, the outfit that had clean room developed Mac ROM's were
filing for chapter 11 status. Too bad if it's true.
,.

response 21 of 60:

Dec 21 04:26 UTC 1994

And now, three years later, Apple has announced that it will be licensing the
PowerPC O/S.  What is the latest news on this?  Also what is the future of 
Power
PC laptops?  Are they licensed as well?  Any new info will be gleefully
absorbed!

response 23 of 60:

Feb 12 12:00 UTC 1995

Radius (established in monitors and video cards) and Power Computing (a new
company with backing from Olivetti among others) are the first two companies
that have announced purchasing licenses from Apple to build Mac clones.
Radius has publically shown a Mac clone that looked like a Quadra 950 in
a "wavy" case and would be sold as a high end video editing machine (loaded
with Radius video hardware, of course).  CompuAdd will be building the first
machines for Power Computing.
  
Other names that have come up as potential cloners:  Acer, Gateway 2000,
Dell, IBM, Canon, and Toshiba.
  
Most pundits seem to think that the real Mac clone market won't take off
until the Mac OS supports a hardware abstraction layer.  This should be
part of System 8.0 (out in late '96) and means that the clones won't
have to be as wedded to Mac ROMs as they do now.