Originally published at: Taiwan used to make unlicensed Apple II clones with names like The Banana | Boing Boing
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Taiwan was the place for clones back then, especially coin-op arcade boards.
They could take any new arcade game, and be turning out clone copies in no time, and the copy prevention gimmicks didn’t slow them down much at all.
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Came here to make sure the Banana Junior 6000 got a mention. I can now leave satisfied.
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I knew this would first comment out of the gate. Well done!
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The Apple II+ used all off-the-shelf parts, so it was easy to clone with a wire-wrap tool and some patience. The //e used custom ASICs that only Apple could buy, so that limited clones.
I’d also like to point out that avoiding US customs wasn’t the only goal… I saw a Banana in South America.
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yeah. ive heard you’re not supposed to use one of those, just look at it
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In 1986 in high school I had the Panasia Apple II clone. It had one floppy drive and 48K memory. It did not have the 16K card so I had only 40 columns of text and uppercase only(!). Monitor was our old 14 inch b&w TV. It was about half the price of a real Apple II. I paid for my own phone line with a job at the Sizzler, and got up to some mild mischief with a 300 baud modem - and lots of BASIC programming, on that computer and remotely on others (did I mention the mischief?).
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Some friends made these. PCB made in Toronto, linear power supply with locally made transformer, sheet metal case. You populated the board yourself. Made lots of money. Did it hurt Apple? People I knew who bought these things wouldn’t have bought the real thing, but did buy Apple peripherals and SW, so I’m not too sure.
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Indeed; thank you Bloom County.
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Borrow the ROMs from a friend and make copies?
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Get 'em same guy you got your weed from. This was circa 1982, long before Franklin Ace, and these mass market clones.
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YES! Saved a copy of this one back in the day, kept it for years. Was hoping it was posted here, otherwise would have had to try to locate it.
This post reminded me about the Franklin Ace we bought at a liquidator, and that sent me down this rabbit hole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Franklin_Computer_Corp.
Franklin’s arguments in that case are awesome! They appear to have carried a district court with the argument “We had to copy Apple’s software because that was the only way to make our computers the same as Apple’s”
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A contemporary article,
The newly established precedent was then taken up by IBMs legal department.
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Came here looking for this and was going to post it if I didn’t see it 
If that’d hit my radar in the right timeframe, I might have gone for it. One of my main complaints about the Apple II is that it didn’t come in kit form.
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… maybe Ikea should sell computers 
Taiwan?
We don’t need Taiwanese stuff in Italy!
We had the Lemon II, a very good clone.
But a real Apple II in my high school was the second computer I put my hands on.
The first was a clone of the Junior Computer (a clone-ish of the Kim-1) I ‘designed’ (just simplified the memory circuitry using more moder RAMs and EPROMs) and built.
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