@DosFox clone aficionado! I found a cool thing you might like.
Have a look at page 78 here: https://win.adrirobot.it/nuova_elettronica/pdf/nuova-elettronica-104-105.pdf
I went to buy food for my cats and came home with a paper copy of this old magazine, and there is a kit of an (allegedly) Apple IIe compatible clone described. Complete with schematics, pity the thing uses PROMs/PALs and of course those are not described in the article.
Would be so cool to find one and clone the clone...
@hkz woah that's definitely piqued my interest!
I'll dig into that when I have the chance
@DosFox I doubt I'll ever run into one in the wild. The cost for that thing in kit form was considerable.
Still, sometimes Nuova Elettronica kits pop up at fairs, so I'll keep an eye out just in case.
@hkz those schematics are absolutely gorgeous though.
Shame that the ROMs/PROMs are likely lost to time
@DosFox From an italian newsgroup, one guy mentioned he checked the ROMs and found them to be almost identical to original IIe ones. The PROMs/PALs on the other hand, he did say he was able to copy 5 of 7, but the last 2 were registered.
And all this was 17 years ago. You know what, I'll ask him anyway.
@hkz may as well!
Reminds me I need to message that guy with a prototype Macintosh ii
@csilverman well that's... Intriguing. Isn't that part of the original medium Mac proposal?
Admittedly information on the Macintosh ii (well, Milwaukee) is pretty sparse. It doesn't help that people get confused with Big Mac as well 😅
@DosFox Yeah, I thought Medium Mac *was* the Mac II: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/mac/prototypes/1985_Med_Mac/Med_Mac_Proposal_19850607.pdf
Here it is! Page 230, “Insanely Great”, by Steven Levy:
"Until very late in the process, [Mac II hardware designer Brian] Berkeley dictated that the power supply would be placed in the monitor—a surprisingly wrongheaded solution that would have limited the range of screen options available to Mac II users."
(That "Power Supply In Monitors vs. In CPU" item in the proposal does suggest this was a point of contention.)
@DosFox From the book:
"Dhuey believed that out of the File Server's ashes should come Macintosh II, or as he called it, Little Big Mac"
"Jean-Louis Gassee came across the project and benignly permitted it to continue, albeit as sort of a "background skunkworks"...[Gassee] renamed the project "Milwaukee."
As I understand it:
- LBM/MM were what this was called when it started
- Got named Milwaukee further along
- This didn't come from BM—that was something else: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_(computer)
@DosFox "Insanely Great" has a good overview of the story:
- The File Server, which never happened
- BigMac—also never happened, sounds like it was supposed to be a superpowered successor to the all-in-one Mac, vs the pizza-box form factor of the File Server/Mac II
- and then Dhuey's secret spinout of the File Server, which he called Little Big Mac/Medium Mac
- …after which Jean-Louis renamed it Milwaukee/Reno/Uzi/Paris… (these guys *loved* their codenames)
- and then *that* shipped as Mac II
hkz
DosFox
Chris Silverman 🌻