SO WHAT’S A CLONE NOW?
In the early days when Personal Computers had just started to saturate the market, life was simple for the neanderthal geeks. Back then, when a 286 cost P50,000.00 and the peso had real value, he only had two choices, either he had an IBM Personal Computer or he had a clone.
I got started on an 80 Mhz 386 AMD bag of chips with 4MB of memory (making 286 users salivate) with a black and white VGA monitor that I later upgraded to color. For some reason, even 3-D apps could run without a hitch on such low power. My favorite game at the time was Wing Commander 2 for which I proudly created a boot disk to take advantage of "expanded memory."
Back to the point. Since IBM created the fundamental PC design, the only "original" Personal Computers had the IBM logo proudly emblazoned on them. Everything else was a "clone". Reputable names such as Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, Philips (were there other names? and yes Philips used to manufacture PC’s, it was Philips’ advertising that in fact gave rise to the term "bag of chips") were considered "branded", but clones nevertheless.
Unlike IBM, Apple was more hesitant to release to the public the blueprint of its Macintosh, hence, there is no longer such thing as a Mac clone, allowing Apple greater control (and hegemony) of the quality of Mac products.
If your computer had been put together by your local neighborhood computer shop, it was considered "generic" or a "bag of chips".
Usage has confused the three terms, as people often refer to generic computers as clones. Well, esentially correct as ALL generic PC’s necessarily are clones. But we now know that not all clones are generic.
Well, this all has been relative peace and stability, because IBM’s personal computer business has been purchased by Lenovo Computers, China’s biggest manufacturer of *gasp* CLONES!
So what exactly is a clone now? If a manufacturer of clones owns IBM’s pc business, will anything branded "IBM" be considered a clone too? Are Lenovo clones already REAL personal computers? Should we just reduce the distinctions to "branded" and "generic"? Or "branded" and "clones"?
Does it really matter to you and me?
No.
Why on earth did I wite this?
Maybe I just had to get it out of my system.
I should write something more meaningful.
Next: HOW IBM LOST THE OS WARS, AND HOW IT CAN STILL WIN
