The StarMax 3000/160MT, a Macintosh clone manufactured by Motorola.

A Macintosh clone is a personal computer made by a manufacturer other than Apple, using (or compatible with) Macintosh ROMs and system software. Image File history File linksMetadata Download high resolution version (559x827, 151 KB) Summary Motorola StarMax 3000/160MT computer. ... Image File history File linksMetadata Download high resolution version (559x827, 151 KB) Summary Motorola StarMax 3000/160MT computer. ... A Motorola StarMax 3000/160MT The Motorola StarMax was a line of Macintosh clones produced by Motorola in 1996 and 1997. ... Motorola Inc. ... Apple Inc. ... For other uses, see Macintosh (disambiguation) and Mac. ... A microcontroller, like this PIC18F8720 is controlled by firmware stored inside on FLASH memory In computing, firmware is a computer program that is embedded in a hardware device, for example a microcontroller. ... System software is a generic term referring to any computer software which manages and controls the hardware so that application software can perform a task. ...

Background

The Apple II and IBM PC computer lines were "cloned" by other manufacturers who had reverse-engineered the minimal amount of firmware in the computers' ROM chips and subsequently legally produced computers that would run the same software.^[1] These clones were seen by Apple as a threat, as Apple II sales had presumably suffered from the competition provided by Franklin Computer Corporation and other clone manufacturers,^[1] both legal and illegal. At IBM, the threat proved to be real: most of the market eventually went to cloners like Compaq, Leading Edge, Tandy, Kaypro, Packard Bell, and dozens of smaller companies, and in short order IBM found it had lost control over its own platform. The 1977 Apple II, complete with integrated keyboard, color graphics, sound, a plastic BIG HAIRY DICK case, and eight expansion slots. ... IBM PC (IBM 5150) with keyboard and green screen monochrome monitor (IBM 5151), running MS-DOS 5. ... Reverse engineering (RE) is the process of taking something (a device, an electrical component, a software program, etc. ... A microcontroller, like this PIC18F8720 is controlled by firmware stored inside on FLASH memory In computing, firmware is a computer program that is embedded in a hardware device, for example a microcontroller. ... A microcontroller, like this PIC18F8720 is controlled by firmware stored inside on FLASH memory In computing, firmware is a computer program that is embedded in a hardware device, for example a microcontroller. ... Franklin Computer Corporation is an American computer manufacturer based in Burlington, New Jersey, founded in 1981. ... Compaq Computer Corporation is an American personal computer company founded in 1982, and now a brand name of Hewlett-Packard. ... Leading Edge Hardware Products, Inc. ... Tandy is a name which can refer to Tandy Corporation - former name of the RadioShack Corporation Tandy Computers was the computer division of the Tandy Corporation, which manufactured the TRS-80 and Tandy Color Computer, among others. ... The Kaypro Corporation Logo, circa 1982. ... Two different consumer electronics companies have used the Packard Bell name. ...

Apple eventually licensed the Apple II ROMS to other companies. The earliest, the Bell & Howell Apple II+ was manufactured by projector and lens manufacturer Böwe Bell & Howell to capitalize on its stature in schools.^[1] The Bell & Howell Apple II+ was notable for its black enclosure with carrying handle, its coaxial video output and a stereo jack for headphones.^[2] Unlike the Apple II+, which lacked UL Certification because its case could be opened while it was running, the Bell & Howell was fully certified.^[3] Apple also licensed the Apple II ROMS to educational toy manufacturer Tiger Electronics to produce an inexpensive laptop with educational games and the AppleWorks software suite, the Tiger Learning Computer (TLC). The TLC lacked a built in display.^[2] Its lid acted as a holster for the cartridges that stored the bundled software since it had no floppy drive.^[2] The UL Mark Underwriters Laboratories Inc. ... AppleWorks is an office suite of software applications sold by Apple Computer. ...

Wary of repeating history and wanting to retain tight control of its product, Apple's Macintosh strategy included technical and legal measures that rendered the production of Mac clones problematic. The original Macintosh system software was a very large amount of complex code that embodied the Mac's entire set of APIs, including the use of the GUI and file system. Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, much of the system software was included in the Macintosh's physical ROM chips. Therefore, any competitor attempting to create a Macintosh clone without infringing copyright would have to reverse-engineer the ROMs, which would have been an enormous and costly process without certainty of success. Only one company, Nutek, managed to produce "semi-Mac-compatible" computers in the early 1990s by partially re-implementing System 7 ROMs.^[4] API may refer to: In computing, application programming interface In petroleum industry, American Petroleum Institute In education, Academic Performance Index This page concerning a three-letter acronym or abbreviation is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... For library and office filing systems, see Library classification. ... System 7 (codenamed Big Bang) was a version of Mac OS, the operating system of the Apple Macintosh computer. ...

Emulators

Before true clones were available, the Atari ST could be converted into a Mac by adding the third-party Spectre GCR emulator, which required that the user purchase a set of Mac ROMs. The Amiga could also be converted into a Mac with similar emulators.^{[citation needed]} Since Apple Computer never manufactured a 68060-based Mac, the fastest way to run native 68000 Mac OS applications on real hardware was to run it on an Atari or Amiga with a 68060 upgrade. The Atari ST is a home/personal computer that was commercially popular from 1985 to the early 1990s. ... The Spectre GCR was a hardware add-on to the Atari ST computers that plugged into the cartridge port. ... This article is about the family of home computers. ... The Amiga computer could be used to emulate several other computer platforms, including legacy platforms such as the Commodore 64, and its contemporary rivals such as the IBM PC and the Apple Macintosh. ... The Motorola 68060 is a 32-bit microprocessor from Motorola, and is the successor to the Motorola 68040. ...

The first Macintosh clones

Apple's strategy of suppressing clone development was successful. From 1986 to 1991, several manufacturers created Macintosh clones, including the portable Outbound; however, in order to do so legally, they had to obtain official ROMs by purchasing one of Apple's Macintosh computers, remove the required parts from the donor, and then install those parts in the clone's case. This resulted in very expensive, relatively unpopular clones. Apple could safely say that its share of the Macintosh computer market was not in danger and even granted value-added reseller status to the creator of the Colby Dynamac portable clone.^{[citation needed]} The Outbound Laptop was an Apple Macintosh-compatible laptop computer. ...

A Brazilian company called Unitron is thought to have developed a Macintosh clone with 512KB of RAM and some custom chips made by National Semiconductor.^[5] The clone was not widely sold because Apple pressed the American government to create commercial sanctions preventing international sales of this computer. To this day it remains a mystery whether the Unitron Mac's ROMs were reverse-engineered or merely copied.^[6]

Official Macintosh clone program

By 1995, Apple Macintosh computers accounted for about 7% of the worldwide desktop computer market. Apple executives decided to launch an official clone program in order to expand Macintosh market penetration. Apple's clone program entailed the licensing of the Macintosh ROMs and system software to other manufacturers, each of which agreed to pay a royalty for each clone computer they sold. From early 1995 through mid-1997, it was possible to buy PowerPC-based clone computers running Mac OS, most notably from Power Computing. Other licensees were Motorola, Radius, APS Technologies, DayStar Digital, and UMAX. In terms of exterior styling, Mac clones often more closely resembled generic PCs than their Macintosh counterparts, but they frequently offered better performance at a lower price than true Macs. Market share, in strategic management and marketing, is the percentage or proportion of the total available market or market segment that is being serviced by a company. ... To licence or grant licence is to give permission. ... Royalty may refer to either: the royal family of a country with a monarchy royalties the payment made to the owner of a copyright, patent, or trademark, for the use thereof This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... PowerPC is a RISC microprocessor architecture created by the 1991 Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM. Originally intended for personal computers, PowerPC CPUs have since become popular embedded and high-performance processors as well. ... Power Computing was a short-lived manufacturer of Apple Macintosh-compatible computers. ... Motorola Inc. ... Radius was a computer hardware firm founded by Burrell Smith, Andy Hertzfeld, Mike Boich, Matt Carter, Alain Rossman and other members of the original Mac team specialising in Macintosh equipment. ... DayStar Digital, Inc. ... Umax, currently a manufacturer of consumer and professional scanners, digital cameras, and a number of Bluetooth networking products, was formerly a maker of Apple Macintosh clones. ...

Jobs ends the official program

Soon after Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he attempted to re-negotiate the clone manufacturers' license agreements to raise Apple's royalty^{[unreliable source?]}. Jobs proposed to raise the per-computer royalty by an amount that would render all the clones unable to compete on price. When the clone makers refused, Jobs in turn refused to license later versions of Apple hardware and operating system software to the clone vendors. The initial OS license was valid only for the 7.x series of the Mac OS; at the time these contracts were signed, Mac OS 8.0 was expected to be the next-generation Copland OS. Jobs exploited this loophole by declaring the imminent version of the Mac OS, which would otherwise have been released as 7.7, to be released as 8.0, leaving the clone manufacturers without the ability to ship a current Mac OS version and effectively ending the cloning program. Steven Paul Jobs (born February 24, 1955) is the co-founder, chairman and CEO of Apple Inc. ... Copland was a project at Apple Computer to create an updated version of the Macintosh operating system. ...

Jobs publicly stated^{[citation needed]} that the program was ill-conceived and had been a result of "institutional guilt," meaning that for years, there had been a widely held belief at Apple that had the company aggressively pursued a legal cloning program early in the history of the Macintosh, consumers might have turned to low-priced Macintosh clones rather than low-priced IBM/PC-compatible computers. Had it pursued a clone program in the 1980s, in this view, Apple might have ended up in the position currently occupied by Microsoft—an extremely powerful company with high profit margins and a wide base of consumers perpetually dependent on its system software products. Jobs claimed it was now too late for this to happen, that the Mac clone program was doomed to failure from the start, and since Apple made money primarily by selling computer hardware, it ought not engage in a licensing program that would reduce its hardware sales. Microsoft Corporation, (NASDAQ: MSFT, HKSE: 4338) is a multinational computer technology corporation with global annual revenue of US$44. ...

Regardless of the status of cloning for Mac OS 7 through 9, Mac OS X was designed to boot from Open Firmware, and thus could not work with any existing clone technology. NEXTSTEP was already running on machines, such as the Sun Microsystems SPARC platform, which booted from Open Firmware, and eventually the Macintosh incorporated Open Firmware. However, Apple continued to include proprietary ROM chips within all Macs in order to prevent clones that would be capable of running Mac OS X. Open Firmware (also, OpenBoot) is a hardware-independent firmware (computer software which loads the operating system), developed by Mitch Bradley at Sun Microsystems, and used in post-NuBus PowerPC-based Apple Macintosh computers, Sun Microsystems SPARC based workstations and servers, IBM POWER systems, Pegasos systems, and the laptop designed by... NEXTSTEP is the original object-oriented, multitasking operating system that NeXT Computer, Inc. ... Sun Microsystems, Inc. ... Sun UltraSPARC II Microprocessor Sun UltraSPARC T1 (Niagara 8 Core) SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) is a RISC microprocessor instruction set architecture originally designed in 1985 by Sun Microsystems. ...

Macintosh cloning today

Since Apple transitioned the Macintosh to an Intel platform in 2006, and subsequent to a major increase in visibility (if not in computer market share) for Apple with the success of the iPod, large computer system manufacturers such as Dell have expressed renewed interest in creating Macintosh clones. Mac OS X currently has less risk of being compromised by security threats compared to computers running Microsoft Windows operating systems and there are no viruses for Mac OS X. Macintosh computers ship with consumer-oriented "lifestyle" software (such as the iLife suite) which is attractive to home users. While various industry executives, notably Michael Dell, have stated publicly that they would like to sell Macintosh-compatible computers, Apple VP Phil Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers' hardware. "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac," he said.^[7] However, illegal hacked versions of Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5, dubbed "Mac OSx86", are available to use on generic PC hardware. The Apple Intel transition was the process of changing the CPU of Macintosh computers from PowerPC processors to Intel x86 processors. ... x86 or 80x86 is the generic name of a microprocessor architecture first developed and manufactured by Intel. ... iPod is a brand of portable media players designed and marketed by Apple and launched in October 2001. ... This article is about the corporation Dell, Inc. ... Windows redirects here. ... This article needs additional references or sources for verification. ... Michael Saul Dell (born February 23, 1965, in Houston, Texas) is the founder and CEO of Dell, Inc. ... Philip Schiller Philip W. Schiller is Apple Computer’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing and reports to Apple CEO Steve Jobs. ... OSx86 running on a Hackintosh OSx86 is a collaborative hacking project to run the Mac OS X computer operating system on non-Apple personal computers with x86 architecture processors. ...

With the advent of cross-platform web applications, commodity PC hardware and the Apple Intel transition Macintosh cloning has begun to refer to imitations of the Mac's user interface, specifically the Aqua GUI audiovisual presentation. Windows XP and open source projects like Compiz Fusion are adding the layered transparency and 3d transformation effects pioneered by OS X. The Apple Intel transition was the process of changing the CPU of Macintosh computers from PowerPC processors to Intel x86 processors. ... Windows XP is a line of operating systems developed by Microsoft for use on general-purpose computer systems, including home and business desktops, notebook computers, and media centers. ... Open source refers to projects that are open to the public and which draw on other projects that are freely available to the general public. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ...

External links

• Mac Clones and New O/S movie from archive.org

Internet Archive, San Francisco The Internet Archive (archive. ...

Notes