Re: Clone - see if this looks familiar

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

Ernest wrote:

>Well there ya go. It makes me wonder how many of the clone boards that
>I have were built by hobbiests, rather than at the factory.

I understand (and others can certainly chime in with additional scenarios)
that in the heyday of the Apple II+, many strategies were used by people
who wanted Apples but didn't want to pay full price.

You could buy ready-to-run machines in Apple-knockoff plastic cases.
You could buy assembled (usually by hand in a Taiwan alley) boards,
then put them in a case and connect a keyboard in your own way.
You could buy bare boards and assemble them entirely on your own.
You could get the Apple schematic or a clone schematic and lay out
your own board and go from there.
You could design your own Apple-like computer and fabricate it.

Which strategy you took depended on your design/fabrication abilities
and your access to inexpensive or free parts, often from your place
of work.

Many bought ready-to-run machines, fewer bought assembled boards,
even fewer bought bare boards (almost all engineers or techs), and
almost none layed out their own boards or designed their own circuits.
(That was a lot of work, and clone boards were cheap.)

Anyone who bought or built just a board had to come up with their own
packaging, and that led to a fair number (not large in the US) of machines
with novel/unusual packaging.  Of course, many people who sold clone
boards also sold clone packages of some kind, so there was less
diversity than one might expect.

The same cloning pattern was repeated in expansion cards, with both
assembled and blank boards being readily available for all the popular
functions.

Anyone who built a board (main or expansion) had a choice of using
pseudo-legal "clone" ROMs or just copying the real thing.  Many opted
for copying authentic ROMs, for both reliability and compatibility.

The clone market arose and grew because of the very large markups
charged by Apple Computer and the distribution and manufacturing
ecosystem that grew up around them.

For low volume products, like EPROM burners or music cards, high
markups were essential to make their businesses sustainable, but for
high volume products, like the Apple II itself, or the Disk ][, the high
margins financed the rapid growth and diversification of products from
Apple Computer--culminating in the Mac, which ultimately replaced
the Apple II as Apple's primary source of profit.

-michael

 Email:  mjmahon@aol.com
 Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/