
The first official Mac clone: Daydream - tambourine_man
http://www.osnews.com/story/29661/The_first_official_Mac_clone_Daydream
======
jasonjayr
From the linked Daydream manual:

    
    
         NOTE: SCSI is the nightmare of many computer users and system administrators. In most cases, the reason
        for improper operation are bad cables and incorrect termination. For proper termination rules, 
        turn to the manuals that come with System 7 or your NeXT Computer. Also, please note that with SCSI, Cables 
        and Devices can't be separated into 'good' and 'bad', as many bad cables and devices work fine under most
        Linked circumstances. It's the combination that makes the   difference.
    

It's fun to find official documentation that actually tells it like it is :)

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jacobush
Another little oddity - there was a short window in time when the fastest
Photoshop Mac was an Amiga with Mac ROMs and a 68060 processor. (The Quadra
only went as far as 68040.)

~~~
robotmlg
Here's a cool one: Much early (1985) development of Mac software was done on
the Mac XL, which had a 10 MB HDD and 1 MB of RAM, vs the original Mac which
famously had 128k RAM and no HDD. But, the Mac XL was really just a Lisa 2
running a Mac emulator!

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julie1
Official clones.

First steps of Steve Jobs back into apple was to kill the clones franchise.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_StarMax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_StarMax)

~~~
toyg
I wish Apple would sell OSX licenses directly to customers. It would sidestep
the whole clone thing, let enthusiasts build proper hackintoshes, and make it
legal for businesses to support consumers who go down that route. Sure, make
it illegal to OEM or to install for a third party; don't provide any support
whatsoever; but let the hackers play without fear. I bet that awesome things
would happen.

~~~
smacktoward
The Mac's entire brand identity can be summarized in three words: "It Just
Works." Any time people see a machine running MacOS where those words are not
true, it damages the entire brand.

Thus Apple is happy to forgo the extra revenue they could get by selling MacOS
separately, since by doing so they can ensure that the world is not full of
crappy beige boxes slapped together by incompetent OEMs sourcing parts from
the lowest bidders with the word "Mac" attached to them.

~~~
julie1
(hum)

It just work except when the System 7.5.3 was out and powerPC & 68K were
coexisting.

The 'it just work' notably required to go in some arcane control to unfragment
memory (yes RAM), and to do ctrl+ apple? + esc to kill unresponsive .... Adobe
photoshop or illustrator on the PPC 7500 I used to maintain. THE application
one needed.

The colometry profile for scanners and printers where not top notch, and well,
real mac users (the one with a job) had to play with the devil switches and
terminators on SCSI devices to put their work on external media...

We talk about graphist in the 90's here, not hardcore geeks.

The "it just works" was a lie. It was way more an expensive status tool.

The only stuff that differentiated mac users from PC users, was how much
software they were cracking and sharing without any concerns or moral
questions.

I sometimes feel the predominance of mac users among "top geeks" is a bad
sign.

~~~
grzm
_It was way more an expensive status tool._

The stability of modern operating systems indeed makes it easy to forget how
often we dealt with system crashes (remember the bomb?), especially with
resource intensive applications, and even more so when switching between them.

Yet a lot of work indeed got done. The number of newspaper design departments
and graphic artists who relied on Macs is hard to underestimate. It was much
more than just an expensive status tool. Back in the day, the Mac was a tool
that a lot of people relied on, in spite of its flaws.

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thenipper
I had an Outbound
laptop[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outbound_laptop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outbound_laptop)]
when I was in 6th-8th grade. While not a clone it was an interesting machine
that used a ROM from a donor Mac. It's actually in my closet right now. Every
now and then I try and get it to boot up to no avail. :(

~~~
jacobush
That is a clone! A hardware clone, but the software, the ROMs had to be
scavanged.

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yuhong
Reminds me of this thread:
[https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/26061-openstep-68...](https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/26061-openstep-68k/)

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zerohp
A-Max for the Amiga came out in 1988. It was a hardware dongle with Mac roms
and connector for an Apple compatible floppy drive.

~~~
digi_owl
Reminds me that Woz made the claim that the reason the Mac was to resistant to
malware was that most of it existed in ROM. Makes a guy think about
ChromeOS...

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itomato
This thread offers some interesting reading on Daydream and it's ROM image
based cousin Darkmatter:
[http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1722](http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1722)

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wickedOne
wasn't the dynamac a couple of years before 1993?
[http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/dynamac/](http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/dynamac/)

~~~
jacobush
I don't know, but the Wikipedia article makes it sound like Dynamacs were
modified Macintoshes

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clone](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clone)

