Young hopefuls continue to devote enormous effort to coming up with ways to produce clones of Apple Computer Inc’s Macintosh, and the latest is a new company, Nutek Computers Inc in Cupertino, California. According to Microbytes Daily, the company has come up with the first cloning kit that does not require the use of Apple’s proprietary Macintosh ROM chips: up to now, all Mac clones have come with empty sockets and the user has had to acquire the ROMs from whatever source he can. Nutek now says it has developed a Mac-compatible operating system that doesn’t infringe any of Apple’s patents or copyrights, and will offer it in the form of the operating system on disk and in ROM, plus three applications-specific circuits that emulate the Mac’s internal hardware functions, and will be bin ary- and bus-compatible with the Mac. The company claims that any well-behaved Macintosh program, per ipheral, or add-in will work with systems using the kit. It will sup port any CPU from a 68000 to a 33MHz 68040. And in order to avoid any row with Apple over the look and feel of the Macintosh user inter face, Nutek has decided to supplant it with a native language Macintosh version of the Open Software Founda tion’s Motif graphical user inter face, which it reckons is better than the Mac inteface anyway. The company says it is so confident that it wants Apple to study its product.
