Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!apple!bionet!agate!ucbvax!dewey.soe.berkeley.edu!oster
From: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu (David Phillip Oster)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Nifty, legal, product idea.
Message-ID: <26379@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 10 Oct 88 21:52:32 GMT
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu.UUCP (David Phillip Oster)
Organization: School of Education, UC-Berkeley
Lines: 31


People have been complaining that there aren't enough cheap, legal
Mac clones. Here is a product idea that addresses one aspect of that 
market: inexpensive machines on an existing appletalk net. (This idea
doesn't work for stand-alone machines, but it does for any business that
would like to have a few more macs, but doesn't want to pay mac prices.)

Imagine a machine with a tiny rom, lots of ram, maybe a local disk.
a decent keyboard mouse and screen. It is delivered with some dumb
operating system, (say, for example, CP-M68k, just to name a name,
please do not assume that this is my actual opinion of that operating
system.) This operating system exists in part so the manufacturer can
claim the product has a legitimate use, and is not solely a law-breaking
device. (As the manufacterers of radar detectors claim that there device
does not exist solely to aid lawbreakers.)

When you turn the machine on, it checks over appletalk to see if there
are any machines running a special INIT. If it finds one, it asks that
INIT to send it a copy of the MAC ROMs and system software. From then
on, it behaves like a Mac. If you don't have a multi-machine license from
Apple, then you are possibly breaking the law to use that function.
If you can successfully argue that the computer is the network, then you
are not breaking the law. Most users of such a machine would just leave
it on all the time, since booting would be a little slow.

I wonder how hard it would be to convert Magic Sac or Spectre for the 
Atari st to use this scheme.

--- David Phillip Oster            --When you asked me to live in sin with you
Arpa: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu --I didn't know you meant sloth.
Uucp: {uwvax,decvax,ihnp4}!ucbvax!oster%dewey.soe.berkeley.edu