NuTek Mac Clones

While most early Mac clones depended on Macintosh ROMs to function, NuTek spent four years reverse engineering the ROMs in a clean room in its quest to produce a legal Mac clone. It didn’t exactly succeed.

Magazine ad for NuTek OneThe problem was, NuTek’s “clones” didn’t run the Mac OS. NuTek’s graphical user interface was based on open source Motif – in great part so Apple couldn’t sue over the Mac-like, somewhat Mac-compatible operating system.

NuTek’s goal was to produce a “liability-free” chipset it could sell to others who would build 68020– and 68030-based Mac clones. The NuTek chipset was intended to also support 68000 and 68040 CPUs. The end result was a machine roughly equivalent to the Late 1992 Mac IIvx.

NuTek itself released two models in 1993, the One, a 33 MHz 68030-based Mac workalike, and the Duet, which in addition to that ran DOS/Windows on a 66 MHz 486 CPU. NuTek went out of business in 1994.

Further Reading

Articles are listed in chronological order from oldest to newest – the reverse of what we normally do on Low End Mac.

Keywords: #nutek

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