Re: The apple 2, the PC, and the clones

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

Exegete <millers@noneofyourbusiness.com> wrote:

>Supertimer wrote:
>
>  There were many Apple II clones but later all
>> were found illegal.
>
><snip>
>
>
>  These (Laser 128s)were challenged in court in several countries
>> but Apple lost in ALL the cases.
>
>
>Ahem. It would seem that you contradicted yourself. Perhaps you meant 
>that all the early clones were found to be illegal. Even that isn't 
>true, though there were two outstanding victories for Apple: The 
>Franklin 1000/1200 case, and the Asian clones that came into the country 
>without a ROM, which was later put into the machine.

Clones vs. compatibles I suppose.  All the early clones were found
illegal because they were just that, copies of the Apple II design.
The Laser 128 was a compatible, not a clone.  It ran Apple software
because it was engineered to do so but the design of the ROM
was unique.

>The later Franklins and Lasers (and a few others who didn't really make 
>a dent) were legal clones, but by then the Apple II market was shrinking 
>(at least as a share of the total personal computer market), and 
>eventually both companies moved on to other markets (for a time, both 
>also sold PC clones.)

Yup.

Even in the PC world, something that was forgotten was that the
correct term is "IBM PC compatible" and software was sold with
that label as a requirement.

Compaq and the others sold IBM COMPATIBLES not clones.

Now the third party Macs with licenses from Apple WERE in
fact CLONES.  They used Apple technology that's why the
requirement of a license from Apple.

Because these were licensed Mac clones, not true compatibles,
they were always at the mercy of Apple and when Jobs turned
off the tap, the Mac clones dried up.  If the Mac clones had been
third party compatibles, they would not have needed Apple's
approval and might have succeeded.

The difficulty of making a legal Mac compatible (and a IIGS
one as well) is that part of what is considered the OS in other
systems is in fact in the ROM.