Re: Mimic Spartan(s) for me!

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

Ernest wrote, about the Mimic "Spartan":

>It turns out that he (Derick Smith) was one of the original developers of
>this project, and that he has several boxes of Spartan proto-type boards,
>ROMs, notebooks, about it's developement -and a couple of the actual
>devices, still in their shipping boxes, with the display boxes inside. One
>is a proto-type, and the other is a normal retail version. They both have
>the employee signatures on the inside. He even has one of the original,
>first five wire-wrap boards! I guess he had to hit every Radio Shack store
>in the area to get all the parts, and he went on to explain how their
>emmulation was so good that the Spartan even displayed the same bugs that
>the Apple II had, without directly copying any Apple code, so he says.

Hmmm.  When I looked at the web page you supplied:

>http://www.applefritter.com/appleclones/spartan/index.html

I found the following quote from the software developer:

"The software features of the Spartan included a compatible Applesoft BASIC --
very compatible, since it was created by disassembling the binary from the the
Applesoft ROM and reordering assembly level instructions so that the binary
image of the software would be different, but behavior when run would be
identical."

Now that isn't what I'd call a "clean room" reproduction.  In fact, it's very
clearly a "derived work" and subject to the same prohibitions that put
Franklin out of business.  Just two differences:  1)  It's marginally harder
to demonstrate that the code is copied--even down to the bugs (!), and
2) you'd have to fight Microsoft as well as Apple!  Just as well that Mimic
never got to be very big on the radar screen...




-michael

 Email:  mjmahon@aol.com
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