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Re: The apple 2, the PC, and the clones
Bryan Villados wrote:
I worked at Phoenix Technologies in their Asia-Pacific Division, based in
Hawaii, as a ROM-BIOS Engineer. The ROM-BIOS projects my local group worked
on included vendors from ALR, Daewoo, and Toshiba.
<snip>
Thanks Bryan. I've read this before, but it is really interesting to
read if from someone who was there.
Apple didn't do this... DOS 3.3 and ProDOS should have been licensed the
same way, and open it to be compatible with other logic board
implementations. However, they were hard-coded to the hardware platform it
was written for, and that was the genuine Apple II logic board and firmware.
As proof of this, you have to patch ProDOS for it to work on the Franklin
Ace 1000. Even if you successfully cloned the Apple II and legally sold it,
you couldn't include DOS 3.3 or ProDOS with it.
Franklin's 500 and 2000 series not only legally cloned the II, they had
a legal clone of DOS 3.3 as well. One that was much faster than DOS and
that could have 160K on a floppy. They had a highly compatible BASIC as
well. One created by Microsoft to be very AppleSoft compatible. I'm not
sure what the Laser offered for it's OS. I haven't tried to run ProDOS
on my Franklin 500 yet either.
Roy
There were efforts to even
cloning Apple's DOS, however software made for the Apple II were more
dependant to certain hardware specifications then DOS, therefore they did
not run well in a non-pure Apple environment.
Therefore, other than the lack of engineering and marketing, Apple's overall
proprietary architecture and the lack of selling DOS like Microsoft did with
MS-DOS caused the cloning to serve little to no overall money-making
purpose.
--- Bryan