For those of us unaware – unlikely on OSNews, but still – for a hot minute in the second half of the ’90s, Apple licensed its Mac OS to OEMs, resulting in officially sanctioned Mac clones from a variety of companies. While intended to grow the Mac’s market share, what ended up happening instead is that the clone makers outcompeted Apple on performance, price, and features, with clones offering several features and capabilities before Apple did – for far lower prices. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he killed the clone program almost instantly.
The rather abrupt end of the clone program means there’s a number of variants of the Mac OS that never made their way into the market, most notable variants intended for the Common Reference Hardware Platform, or CHRP, a standard defined by IBM and Apple for PowerPC-based PCs. Thanks to the popular classic Mac YouTuber Mac84, we now have a few of these releases out in the wild.
These CDs contain release candidates for Mac OS 7.6 and Mac OS 8 for CHRP (Common Hardware Reference Platform) systems. They were created to support CHRP computers, but were never released, likely due to Steve Jobs returning to Apple in September 1997 and eliminating the Mac Clone program and any CHRP efforts.
↫ Mac OS 7.6/8 CHRP releases page
Mac84 has an accompanying video diving into more detail about these individual releases by booting and running them in an emulator, so we can get a better idea of what they contain.
While most clone makers only got access to Mac OS 7.x, some of them did, in fact, gain access to Mac OS 8, namely UMAX and Power Computing (the latter of which was acquired by Apple). It’s not the clone nature of these releases that make them special, but the fact they’re CHRP releases is. This reference platform was a failure in the market, and only a few of IBM’s own machines and some of Motorola’s PowerStack machines properly supported it. Apple, meanwhile, only aid minor lip service to CHRP in its New World Power Macintosch machines.
Earlier this fall I picked up two PowerComputing clone systems on eBay for a pretty fair price. They happily boot 9.0.4, but are in their sweet spot running 7.6.1 or maybe 8.x. There’s a vast amount of archived software out there that runs nicely on those machines. I have one of them set up to play older games and it’s incredibly amusing to hear the Mac startup chime come out of a beige mini tower that could be the twin of your neighbor’s Dell from 1996.
POWER9,
Given your username I would not expect you to miss on this opportunity. 🙂
However I can’t keep myself from looking at these from power efficiency point of view. And makes it extremely difficult to resurrect an older system, except for maybe demo or “museum” purposes.
That puts me in a bind, since I actually like to older form factors. Maybe they would build “retro-future” machines with classic shells, but with modern processor inside (or in some cases even Raspberry PI)
Urgh, “power efficiency”…
If you’re picking up an older system, you’re probably aware of the performance “penalty” an older system will suffer from. However, many older systems still consume as much power on a KWh basis as many modern systems, and sometimes even less. A modern Core i5 desktop will probably use about the same amount of power per hour as a Pentium running Windows 95.
The biggest difference, and there “power efficiency” is really different, is instructions-per-watt. A modern PC can definitely do a lot more with that power than the Pentium would, going so far as to being able to emulate the Pentium much faster than the real hardware would perform.
But emulation doesn’t scratch every itch. Much like the fact it’s much better to drive a modern Prius than at 67 Chevy, i bet that 67 Chevy is much more fun, even if it’s not anywhere close as fast or fuel efficient as the Prius is. Retro computing is like that.
Too bad all these amazing instructions-per-watt are all busy running bloated software, unwanted transparencies, tracking, telemetry, nagging me with useless notifications, insanely heavy javascript and so on. =)
My Windows 95 machine LITERALLY launched Excel faster than my 64GB RAM laptop and I do not need any of the new formulas or functionality of the newest iterations of Excel.
So, hey, whenever I want to truly focus and get stuff done, I use an old computer. Whenever I need to be online for my boss, I burn 30000x more instructions and memory to send single-line text messages in and out. =)
The123king,
I think I could not properly communicate it.
There are two concerns: what it can do, and how it looks.
Yes, I do actually like how the older computers looked.
However efficiency is a very real concern along with capabilities.
My last Windows XP machine was an Dell Inspiron 531. Today a Raspberry PI 5 runs circles around it (even for gaming). And yes, it can “emulate” a full Windows 95 desktop with more features than Windows 95 ever had and still run faster.
(Windows 95 did not have USB until OSR2, let alone Thunderbolt. It won’t work with my printer or scanner. Forget about using my home 10GBe network — at least there is a USB dongle for the RPi. It won’t even connect to my monitor at native resolution).
Even if I can somehow get a “modern” Pentium clone today, the end result would be inferior in all important factors… except the visuals.
I don’t leave the systems on, so booting them once or twice a week for a few hours at a time is an inconsequential amount of power usage. It’s not like I’m actually using them to get professional work done; they’re toys.
POWER9,
I see your point. There are people who take joy in repairing and maintaining older hardware.
We had one of those clone machines back in the day, in like 2000, 2001, in the office I use to work at. It was FAST. But was also HELLA unstable. It used to crash and trigger a network crash, bringing down everyone else’s machines, if anyone remembers those. Good times!
We had that when IPX was still a thing, and Ethernet was using BNC connectors that required terminating. But… that sounds even worse than anything I experienced.
I didn’t know these were “lost” or no one had them. I have all my SuperMac CD’s still. 7.0.1 and a 7.0.4 update, and a 7.6 CD. Pretty sure I have a system 7 floppy disk box that’s unopened too from my performa I bought in 91′. Is there a magical list somewhere of people looking? Best place to find all that “what I would call ancient hoarder mac junk” is Mac based advertising and marketing firms. We keep all that junk around just incase we have to open that one client ClarisWorks or Aldus PageMaker file from 1991.