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

["Roger Johnstone" <rojaws@mac.com>]

In article <3d1f846c$1_5@news.teranews.com>, "Bryan Villados" 
<news002@macgeek.org> 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>

> Apple hassled Laser, much like how IBM kept sending Phoenix to court, but in
> both relationships the cloners prevailed. And the reason was mostly due to
> the clean room strategies used.

Thank you! It's nice to hear it from someone who knows what they're talking
about. The number of times I hear some computer "youngster" pointing out
that if only Apple had allowed the Mac to be cloned like IBM allowed its PC
to be cloned, Apple would have 90% of the market now. What they always fail
to understand is that IBM didn't _want_ their PC to be cloned, it happened
inspite of their attempts to stop it.

> One final thought that may be a contribution to the IBM PC cloning boom, and
> that was Microsoft's MS-DOS. When IBM allowed Microsoft to sell DOS to other
> manufacturers in the early 1980's, that's all that was needed to make the
> clone PC complete. Microsoft licensed MS-DOS to anyone who wanted it,
> including Phoenix Technologies. We sold MS-DOS and our ROM-BIOS as a
> package. Those were the only two components you needed to make a clone PC.
> PC software really only made two types of calls: calls to MS-DOS routines
> (mainly interrupts 21h and 20h), and calls to ROM-BIOS routines. So that
> alone made it very easy to clone the PC.

<snip>

> --- Bryan

I think the Laser 128 always came bundled with Central Point's Copy II Plus.
This gave it a legal copy of ProDOS plus utilities far better than Apple's
old System Utilities.

--
Roger Johnstone, Invercargill, New Zealand

Apple II - FutureCop:LAPD - iMac Game Wizard
http://homepage.mac.com/rojaws
________________________________________________________________________
"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons"

  Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949