Anyone hear anything new about the MacIntosh clones?
        Are they still "working out the kinks", or are they hung up legally?

60 responses total.

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)

I've been kind of wondering about these myself.  Maybe the company ran
into some technical troubles with 7.0, or maybe the company is having
funding problems.

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.

MacWorld had a whole bg article on these a few months ago, and it seemed like 
they were mostly there...

Anything can be cloned, physically. The IBM's are a special case, because
Intel made the architecture public.
        Macs, on the other hand, are not only kept semi-secret (well...) but 
the main stumbling block, ROM-dependant. 
        The Mac OS is in ROM. It's considered copyrightable. So you can't 
clone it. And a Mac without the ROM is...pretty useless.
        There have been two stabs at laptops, one that had you yank the ROM
out of your existing Mac and plug it in, and another that Apple bougt out.

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.

And very very very very slow.

 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.

Oops. I wasn't thinking. Of course, if you have enough RAM you could throw
it in there. Never mind.
(somehow, the image of the OS being read off a floppy came to my mind...)

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.

 Yes, they are a bit silly about it, but they don't want to lose control
of the Mac market the way IBM lost control of the PC market.

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...)

  Yes..  Actually, I think they're restricting it a little too tightly.
It's easy to lose control of it that way, too.

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.

One of the most promising Mac clone companies (one featured in the
MacWorld article a while back, as using an expensive clean-room
approach in developing compatible ROMs), just filed for bankruptcy.
"Cork Computer Corporation, which had planned a Macintosh clone, has
filed for reorganization under Chapter 11...." 
 
Cloning the mac hardware is reasonably easy, aside from the ROMs (which
is really a software problem), as evidenced by the Amiga's and Atari's
mac compatibility - they weren't even designed as Mac clones, but did
a reasonable job, with copies of the code in the ROMs.  I suspect that
the only way to get a clone to market and survive legal battles is to
take the approach Cork did - rewrite it from the Mac specs.  (Or license
the ROMs from Apple, which would probably take even longer!)

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.

Huh?  NewTek is the company that makes the Amiga Video Toaster.. a product
which has single-handedly given the Amiga an incredible boost in prestige
(and profitability).  No doubt they have deep pockets because of it (not
sure if production has caught up with demand yet).  But where did you hear
they were writing Mac-compatible ROMs? 
 (BTW Dave, it is alledged that NewTek was started by ex-CoCo guys.. which
makes sense, given that they write just about everything in pure assembly
language.. interesting trivia tidbit, anyhow..)

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.

Ah!  Thanks Dave, that's been one of my great unanswered questions.. Tim
Jenison.  CoCoMax was a great program.. 
 Byte mentioned something about the Mac-clone chipsets many issues ago.. but
nothing recent.  Think it was Byte, around their Nanobytes section. 

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.
,.

   Really.  I wonder what will happen to the code itself.

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!

Last I heard, the new chairman was saying that plans to license Mac OS
may have been premature.

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.

Radius's clones will probably find a successful niche at the high end.
They are looking to establish a product line aimed at video and
multimedia professionals. Apple's margins are very high in that part
of its product line, and Radius may have some luck. This is not a small niche.

Low end clones will probably follow as sarrica suggested.
This is certainly a much bigger market.

Pioneer has also signed on to clone Macs.
 (as of last week)

I was at the computer store and i saw a bord that was for a PC, but had all
of the MAC's guts on it. It said it had the equivelent of a 486/33.

Sure you don't have the backwards?

And here we are in 1998 and Apple was talking last year of making the mac
propreitary again.  What happened with that?  Will they ever learn?  Is
Apple on it's way out soon?

They closed down Power Computing by withdrawing the license. But they
have introduced more new models and, amazingly, turned a profit last
quarter. It is hard to keep a billion dollar business down. The Macs
are now being sold only by mail order and in CompUSA stores - a sort
of Mac Boutique (which I have not yet seen). I have only bought Macs
recently, mostly because our department at UM has been all Mac, but I
recognize their advantage in ease of set up and use. I read that Mac
is still aiming at the upper-end, graphics-heavy market, but their
machines are still great for the general public.

(I happen to think unix us *much* easier to use than a mac, but then who am
I to say?)
I doubt Mac will disappear soon.  There too large of a user base.

The "Mac" is  GUI. Isn't unix only a shell language?

Modern unix provides for a choice of quite a number of different GUIs. 
Also, thanks to X-windows architecture, you can operate these GUIs 
remotely, providing you have adequate bandwidth between the two points.

Grex has all this GUI stuff turned off, of course. 

I like all 3 architectures, and use them all regularly.

I've never seen GUI unix.....

I personally run 3 different unixes (linux, freebsd, and solaris) with GUI
support.  To be honest, I'm not surprised you haven't seen a GUI unix.  You
would only se eit if you work with high end unix workstations (Such as Sun
or Digital) or are already a unix freak and intall your own version of unix
with a GUI, in which case you've probably already seen a unix GUI from the
first case.  (Did that make sense? ... I guess so.)

         What is BSD?

BSD is one of the two origional flavors of unix, coming from Berkley.  The
other one is System Revision V (or SRV)  All unix is descended from one or
both of these.  Linux, I believe, is SRV, and so is Sun OS (What Grex runs)
FreeBSD and NetBSD are two free versions of unix for, among other things, the
Intel platform.  They are descended from BSD.

"BSD" == "Berkely Software Distribution"

        Learn something every day.

Well, not exactly a problem...  On a Mac desktop there is an Apple icon
in the upper left corner, which open the Apple Menu. When some applications
are opened, sometimes the Apple icon alternates with an icon for that
application. I think the Telnet icon is one that alternates. 

However now I have noticed that a new and different icon alternates with
the Apple even when no application is open. I cannot recall when this
started, and I cannot figure out what this icon represents. I will
describe it:

It shows a blue base, something like a letter tray, in which is a pile
of something like white envelopes or cards, but superimposed upon this
pile is a red arrow pointing downward. 

I have looked for this icon on items in the HD, System, Extensions, Apple
Menu Items, and Startup folders. It is not there, or on the control strip

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss