30 years ago, Apple fans met the Mac clone. This is the weird, wild story

Three decades later, the legacy of Apple's weird decision is still with us.

- BY JASON SNELL

Thirty years ago, the first Mac clones rolled off an assembly line in Austin, Texas. If you're not of a certain age, you might not even believe there once were Mac clones. For most of its existence, Apple has been a singular company, selling products that were a fusion of custom hardware and custom software.

But for about three wild years in the 1990s, Apple defied its own nature and allowed other companies to build computers that ran the Mac OS and competed directly with Apple. It was an era that made some longstanding contributions to the history of the Mac, but also one that Steve Jobs dramatically ended pretty much the moment he returned to power at Apple.

The DayStar Genesis MP as it appeared in Macworld magazine.

BUT...WHY?

The mid-’90s was a weird time for Apple. Microsoft and Intel dominated the computer industry so much that Apple’s tiny market share just kept shrinking, and Apple struggled to make money. You might think that allowing other companies to compete with Apple would just make things worse, but desperate times called for desperate measures, and Apple CEO Michael Spindler (who had taken over for the deposed longtime CEO John Sculley) decided to take those measures.

The clone strategy was designed to allow third-party hardware makers to create systems that served markets Apple didn't serve very well, allowing Mac OS to penetrate areas where Windows was winning and turn the tide. But that didn’t happen. Instead, Apple found itself boxed in on both sides.

At the high end, Georgia-based DayStar Digital built the first multiprocessor Mac clones (fave.co/3I3X2cw) targeted at the professional publishing market. DayStar built expensive computers that were faster than any of Apple’s systems, and it sold them to some of Apple’s most profitable customers.