Most early Mac clones were built around 8-16 MHz 68000 CPUs or 16-40 MHz 68030 chips, but the 68000 Dash 30fx ran its 68030 at a blazing 50 MHz – 25% faster than the “wicked fast” Mac IIfx, which was the fastest computer on the market when it went on sale in March 1990.
Category Archives: Early Mac Clones
You may not remember the Atari ST family, a series of computers based on the same 8 MHz Motorola 680×0 CPUs as the early Macs. They never really carved out a niche in the US, although they were moderately popular in Europe. The STs offered PC compatible floppy drives, a DOS-compatible filing system, and GEM, […]
Thanks to Richard Savary for sending information about the Dynamac. Mentioned in Byte (May 1988), the jet black Dynamac EL weighs 18 pounds, uses an 8 MHz 68000 CPU, has an 800K floppy, and shipped with 1 MB RAM (expandable to 2.5 MB or 4 MB). It was essentially a portable Mac Plus.
In addition to building the first commercial portable Mac, the WalkMac, Chuck Colby also developed the first Mac tablet, which he called the Colby Classmate™ Portable Computer. It was introduced at the August 1991 Macworld Expo in Boston.
In the era of the Sony Walkman™, it was inevitable someone would create a WalkMac. That’s what Chuck Colby called his portable when it was introduced in 1987.
Perhaps the best known early portable Mac clone came from Outbound systems. It was announced in August 1989, just weeks before Apple unveiled the Macintosh Portable.
This could be the rarest Mac compatible ever made. Outside of a few prototypes, only about 100 McMobiles were ever made.
Since Brazil didn’t allow the import of microcomputers until 1993, anything users wanted had to be made in and for the local market. For those who wanted a Macintosh, Unitron created the Mac 512, essentially a clone of the 512 KB “Fat Mac”.
Because the NuTek clones predate the widespread use of the Internet, and because BYTE magazine is history, we’ve scrounged up the few BYTE articles we could find online about NuTek and share them here in chronological order.
Because the NuTek clones predate the widespread use of the Internet, and because the Macworld archives are spotty from this era, we’ve scrounged up what Macorld articles we could find online about NuTek – just one so far – and share them here in chronological order.
Because the NuTek clones predate the widespread use of the Internet, and because the online Infoworld archives are far from complete, we’ve scrounged up what Infoworld articles we could find online about NuTek and share them here in chronological order. There are at least two more we have not been able to locate.
I found this one mentioned in the July 1991 MacUser magazine, although the Dynamac IIsf had been announced in January 1991. Where the original Dynamac (1987) was essentially a portable Mac Plus, and the short-lived Dynamac SE/30 (1988) was an Mac SE/30 with a 640 x 480 8-bit video card that also supported the 1152 […]
