Counterfeit Apple II computers (1985) [video] | Hacker News Reader

Counterfeit Apple II computers (1985) [video]

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42 pointshggh38 comments

My first computer was an Apple 2 plus clone from Hong Kong. My dad was a teacher on a military base in Okinawa and a pilot friend offered to get one for us.

It was $1000 for the computer, two floppy drives, green monitor, dot matrix printer, 80 column card, z80 card, joystick, paddles, and a pack of 10 games.

At that time an Apple 2 alone cost $1200, IIRC.

The computer itself was superior to an Apple in many ways: it had built in keyboard shortcuts (e.g. ctrl-6 for “PR#6” to reboot from floppy), lower case letters, and 64k on the motherboard.

I’m torn: Then at 8 years old I didn’t understand that it was contraband, but OTOH there’s no way my family could have afforded such a system on my dad’s salary as a fifth grade teacher. It gave me a head start on programming that only rich kids my age had.

Illicit Apple II knockoffs were an occasional find in thrift shops in the US in the early 90s. One of the many things I wish I'd paid the $10 for at the time and kept somewhere safe.

Did it look like this one?

https://youtu.be/vYMiSz-WlEY?si=Mk8Bua_2xGkgLDeR

Almost, though mine looked closer to a normal Apple 2: no number keypad but did have an extra button for toggling upper/lower case. Didn’t have anything where the Apple logo should have been.

> Then at 8 years old I didn’t understand that it was contraband

As an adult I still don't understand what's the problem ;) It was a working computer, and apparently a nice one (offering a lot more bang for the buck than an original Apple). Why does it matter that someone slapped a fake Apple logo on it?

>Why does it matter that someone slapped a fake Apple logo on it?

It's a dis-incentive to investment. If society allowed the fakes then the market would be overrun by copies and in this instance Apple wouldn't have had the resources to create the Mac.

On the other hand, the fact almost anyone can buy a PC that runs almost any program is the result of blatant copying of IBM's machines. Even Apple caved and started selling PCs, because it turned out a unified platform has many advantages that isolated architectures don't have.

We're still stuck with the "everybody has their own designs and specifications" problem on (ARM) phones and tablets and it's affecting both operating system choice and operating system maintainability in major ways.

I dread to think of a world where software written for HP computers wouldn't work on Dells, and where Lenovo's wouldn't be able to run Microsoft software. Developing software would just be needlessly expensive and annoying.

Exactly, if IBM hadn't lost control over the PC, the world would look very different today. We'd probably be stuck with very expensive "professional workstations", Linux probably wouldn't have been created, everything would be closed and tightly controlled platforms like game consoles or mobile phones are today, hardware as a whole would most likely be behind 10..15 years because of lack of competitive pressure (see the messed up PS3 design which was a result of the old "closed platforms" thinking).

I think there's a very solid case to be made that "illegal clones" are actually good for progress.

PS: there's also this interesting take that Germany's quick industrialization in the 19th century was mainly driven by ignoring British copyright law:

https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-...

>I dread to think of a world where software written for HP computers wouldn't work on Dells, and where Lenovo's wouldn't be able to run Microsoft software. Developing software would just be needlessly expensive and annoying.

Having a Wintel monopoly hasn't been great for customers though.

I've always thought that one of HP's biggest failures was ceding control of their platform to Microsoft.

Having a Wintel monopoly hasn't been great for customers though.

Really? Would the PC industry have been as successful -- and its products as widely accessible -- if left up to Apple and a dozen expensive almost-but-not-quite compatible Unix clones? I think not.

My impression when the IBM PC came out, is that they intended to create an open system. They published the schematics. They encouraged anybody to create hardware and software. Their BIOS was copyrighted, but others came out with compatible BIOS's that were not owned by IBM, and that's what triggered the flood of clones. By the time that PC's reached the 386 level, IBM wasn't driving the bus any more.

The Apple II was an open system, but creating a compatible BIOS that wasn't a copy would have been impossible -- even for Apple, because of widespread software that made creative uses of the variables and entry points in the firmware. the Mac was intended to be a closed system.

IBM simply followed the tradition created by the companies already in the microcomputer market. Apple's documentation, for example, included the full schematics and the source listing for the ROMs:

http://cini.classiccmp.org/pdf/Apple/Apple%20II%20Reference%...

You could get similar documentation for all Radio Shack products and many others.

MITS didn't set out to make their Altair 8800 an "open system". In their case it wouldn't make sense not to have the full documentation for the customers that were building their own machines from kits. But this resulted in clones and in competitors rebranding their "Altair bus" as the S100 (standard 100 pin) bus and making improvements to it as a group resulting in MITS losing control. So IBM should have known what would happen, but probably thought they were too big and important for history to repeat itself.

IBM made the PC open because they were operating under a consent decree for being a monopoly in mainframe and other parts of the IT market.

> On the other hand, the fact almost anyone can buy a PC that runs almost any program is the result of blatant copying of IBM's machines.

The PC was made with off-the-shelf parts; only the BIOS is copyrighted and, as analog31 said, IBM published the source code and schematics. That's not the same thing as condoning "blatant copying"; IBM went after clones with infringing BIOS. Most, however, followed Compaq's example and used clean room techniques to build their own, or purchased the Phoenix and other BIOS made the same way.

Almost all Apple II clones of the type described in this video infringed on Apple's intellectual property. The only exceptions are a) the Laser 128, and b) the post-lawsuit Franklin models.

Except most tech investment happens at the government level. Computers were in government labs for 50 years before being privatized. Same with the internet. Also, as Woz told the story of Apple, they built the Apple II on a shoestring budget. They didn't need a lot of capital to create the product (Most of the technology was already invented, Woz was a genius to put it together in a cheap way). Also the Mac was ultimately a failure.

Usually the clones didn't have any Apple branding on the outside of the case. The ROMs would also be modified to not include the word Apple. However, that was usually about the extent of the changes on the ROMs, the rest were direct copies of the Apple II ROM.

There were a couple of companies that reverse engineered the ROMs and created clean room copies. Apple still sued them, but they lost in court. Franklin Computer sold a lot of legal Apple II clones in the US for example.

Of course Apple still sued them.

Apple sued Microsoft, over just the "look and feel" of Microsoft Windows.

They sued samsung and got their phones pulled from the market for "rounded corners" of the kind used to design highways and countless other items for decades

Round Rects Are Everywhere!

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_...

My first computer was an Apple 2 clone too, but there really was no visibile Apple logo or branding on it. My parents bought it for a helfty sum of my Dad's 1 month pay at the time thinking their two kids would learn BASIC programming. lol.

Instead, we just played Rescue Raiders, spy vs spy and whatever other bootleg games we could get our hands on at the time. Good times ;-)

Because you post on HN, I guess it wasn’t a bad investment for your parents. You may not have learned BASIC but you developed an interest in the technology.

I recall they had some IBM PC counterfeit clones as well.

I remember the Laser 128 being an Apple II clone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_128

My family was too poor to afford an Apple II or IBM PC so we got the Commodore 64 for $199 and added things ala cart to it later to turn it into a full system with a floppy disk, modem, and printer.

The C64 is way better than an Apple 2 so maybe a blessing in disguise.

Anyone remember the Albert Apple ][ clone? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_(computer)

My dad had one of these and I thought it was the coolest because it had the text-to-audio synthesizer. Because it was such nascent tech, it said a lot of hilarious pronunciations which was infinitely entertaining when you're like 7 years old.

There were huge numbers of Sinclair ZX Spectrum clones too in the 80s from all kinds of manufacturers. Pirate Spectrums were widely popular in the Soviet Union:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ZX_Spectrum_clones

I remember some of the folks in the company I was working at "repurposing" DRAM chips intended for prototyping to use in their homebrew Apple II clones. They had done a group buy of bare boards and DRAM was pretty expensive, so...

Had an Apple II+ clone that was in a PC style case which made the whole thing more convenient as the drives were in the chassis.

The Apple II+ clone had a CPM card made by Microsoft.

Was it a Trackstar Apple clone on an ISA card maybe?

https://www.diskman.com/presents/trackstar/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhRaTI76S7Q

The CPM card from Microsoft was the Z80 SoftCard:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-80_SoftCard

What shortsightedness from Apple. By aiming to be the sole player in the market and charging exorbitant prices, they paved the way for the IBM PC where the market was wide open and the ecosystem thriving.

After the threats and harassing from Apple, all those manufacturers quickly started producing PC compatibles instead of Apple II compatibles, thereby reducing the Apple II market presence compared to the PC.

Classic case of greed at work.

IBM losing control over the PC platform was more like a happy historical accident though, if the IBM beancounters would have taken the PC platform any serious, they wouldn't have allowed that to happen.

Did they really expect the industry to follow them into the EISA venture?

EISA was the open alternative to IBM's MCA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Industry_Standard_Arc...

In the long term though it accidentally worked out since now they have complete integration and control and don't have to worry about the mess of dealing with other manufacturers. History is weird sometimes, and by sometimes I mean all the time.

What really turned developers away from Apple after the Apple II was not only the price but that you couldn’t sit down at a Macintosh and start programming it like you could with an Apple II. You couldn’t really do that sitting in front of a PC either unless you were happy with GW BASiC, or you bought a Borland compiler, but at least there were less obstructions in your path if you wanted to develop a PC application versus an Apple application. The Macintosh felt like a locked down black box, like you bought a car with the hood welded shut. Overall, PCs were just much more accommodating to developers than the Apple products until Steve Jobs came back and switched everything over to UNIX-based operating system.

No need for a borland compiler, just type your assembly right into debug.exe!

HyperCard should have been that system. I really wonder what the Mac would have been like in the 90s if every machine had that in ROM, ready to go. The web would probably have been a bit different.

You might find the story of MacBasic interesting: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

Apple intended to ship the Mac with a programming language, a really nice threaded and graphical Basic, but Bill Gates put the squeeze on them.

> By aiming to be the sole player in the market and charging exorbitant prices, they paved the way for the IBM PC where the market was wide open and the ecosystem thriving.

And they did it again, paving the way for the Raspberry Pi cyberdeck market that's wide open and the ecosystem thriving. Ken Thompson was the canary.

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