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In computing, a clone is hardware or software that is designed to function in exactly the same way as another system. [1] A specific subset of clones are remakes (or remades), which are revivals of old, obsolete, or discontinued products.
Clones and remakes are created for reasons including competition, standardization, availability across platforms, and as homage. Compatibility with the original system is usually the explicit purpose of cloning hardware or low-level software such as operating systems (e.g. AROS and MorphOS are intended to be compatible with AmigaOS). Application software is cloned by providing the same functionality.
Commercially-motivated clones are made often during a competitor product's initial successful commercial run, intentionally competing with the original and trying to participate in their success.
When IBM announced the IBM PC in 1981, other companies such as Compaq decided to offer clones of the PC as a legal reimplementation from the PC's documentation or reverse engineering. Because most of the components, except the PC's BIOS, were publicly available, all Compaq had to do was reverse-engineer the BIOS. The result was a machine with similar performance and lower price than the machines cloned. The use of the term "PC clone" to describe IBM PC compatible computers fell out of use in the 1990s; the class of machines it now describes are simply called PCs, but the early use of the term "clone" usually implied a higher level of compatibility with the original IBM PC than "PC-Compatible", with (often Taiwanese) clones of the original circuit (and possibly ROMs) the most compatible (in terms of software they would run and hardware tests they would pass), while "legitimate" new designs such as the Sanyo MBC-550 and Data General/One, while not infringing on copyrights and adding innovations, tended to fail some compatibility tests strongly dependent upon detailed hardware compatibility (such as ability to run Microsoft Flight Simulator , or any software that bypassed the standard software interrupts and directly accessed hardware at the expected pre-defined locations, or—in the case of the MBC-550 for example—wrote diskettes which could not be directly interchanged with standard IBM PCs).
While the term has mostly fallen into commercial disuse, the term clone for PCs still applies to a PC made to entry-level or above standard (at the time it was made) which bears no commercial branding (e.g., Acer, Dell, HP, IBM). This includes, but is not limited to, PCs assembled by home users or corporate IT departments. (See also White box (computer hardware).)
There were many Nintendo Entertainment System hardware clones due to the popularity and longevity of the Nintendo Entertainment System.
Examples for hardware remakes include recent home computer remakes.
A special kind of hardware remakes are emulators which implement the hardware functionality completely in software. For instance, the WinUAE emulator software tries to behave exactly like a physical Amiga.
Software can be cloned by reverse engineering or legal reimplementation from documentation or other sources, or by observing a program's appearance and behavior. The reasons for software cloning may include circumventing undesirable licensing fees, acquiring knowledge about the features of the system or creating an interoperable alternative for an unsupported platform. GNU, a clone of UNIX, was motivated by a need of the free software movement for an operating system composed of entirely free software.
In the United States, the case of Lotus v. Borland allows the functionality of a program to be cloned so long as copyright in the code and interface is not infringed.
Yet, the public interface may also be subject to copyright to the extent that it contains expression (such as the appearance of an icon). For example, in August 2012, Electronic Arts, via its Maxis division, put forth a lawsuit against Zynga, claiming that its Facebook game, The Ville , was a direct clone of EA's own Facebook game, The Sims Social . The lawsuit challenges that The Ville not only copies the gameplay mechanics of The Sims Social, but also uses art and visual interface aspects that appear to be inspired by The Sims Social. [2] [3] [4] The two companies settled out of court on undisclosed terms in February 2013. [5]
Examples of software cloning include the ReactOS project which tries to clone Microsoft Windows, and GNU Octave, which treats incompatibility with MathWorks MATLAB as a bug. [6]
Since the start of the video game industry, clones of successful concepts and games have been common. The first influential first-person shooter, Doom , led in the 1990s to the creation of a new genre dubbed as Doom clones. In the 2000s, the open world action-adventure Grand Theft Auto inspired the creation of many Grand Theft Auto clones.
Remakes of software are revivals of old, obsolete, or discontinued software (e.g. abandonware).
A good share of software remakes are fangames of computer games and game engine recreation made by the fan community as part of retrogaming, to address e.g. compatibility issues or non-availability of the original, e.g. a shutdown server gets substituted with a server emulator.
Since the 2000s there has been an increasing number of commercial remakes of classical games by the original developer or publisher for current platforms as the digital distribution lowers the investment risk for niche releases. [7] When enhanced in some way (audio, graphics, etc.) new releases might be called "high definition" release or "special edition"; an example is The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition . [8] [9]
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A database clone is a complete and separate copy of a database system that includes the business data, the database management system software and any other application tiers that make up the environment. Cloning is a different kind of operation to replicate and backup, in that the cloned environment is both fully functional and separate in its own right. Additionally, the cloned environment may be modified at its inception due to configuration changes or data subsetting.
Since 2010, clone computing, in the sense of replicating a session on a host computer in a virtual instance in the cloud, has been introduced. This allows the user to have access to a copy of their PC's desktop on any other computing device such as a tablet computer, a personal computer running any operating system, WebOS, smartphones, etc.
The clone computer replicates, runs, and is always available through a series of cloud servers. Unlike remote management software, clone computing has no dependency on the host computer.
Disk cloning is the process of copying the contents of one computer hard drive to another disk or to an "image" file. Typically, the contents of the first disk are written to an image file as an intermediate step, and the second disk is loaded with the contents of the image. A cloned drive can replace the original, rather than simply containing backup copies of files.
Cloning software replicates the operating system, drives, software and patches of one computer for a variety of purposes, including setting up multiple computers, hard drive upgrades, and system recovery in the event of disk failure or corruption. [10]
In computer programming, particularly object-oriented programming, cloning refers to object copying by a method or copy factory function, often called clone or copy, as opposed to by a copy constructor. Cloning is polymorphic, in that the type of the object being cloned need not be specified, in contrast to using a copy constructor, which requires specifying the type (in the constructor call).
In computing, BIOS is firmware used to provide runtime services for operating systems and programs and to perform hardware initialization during the booting process. The BIOS firmware comes pre-installed on an IBM PC or IBM PC compatible's system board and exists in some UEFI-based systems to maintain compatibility with operating systems that do not support UEFI native operation. The name originates from the Basic Input/Output System used in the CP/M operating system in 1975. The BIOS originally proprietary to the IBM PC has been reverse engineered by some companies looking to create compatible systems. The interface of that original system serves as a de facto standard.
The IBM Personal Computer is the first microcomputer released in the IBM PC model line and the basis for the IBM PC compatible de facto standard. Released on August 12, 1981, it was created by a team of engineers and designers directed by Don Estridge in Boca Raton, Florida.
The Tandy 1000 is the first in a line of IBM PC compatible home computer systems produced by the Tandy Corporation for sale in its Radio Shack and Radio Shack Computer Center chains of stores. Introduced in 1984, the product line was aimed at providing affordable but capable systems for home computing or education, with some of its Tandy specific features like graphics, sound and joystick port making it more appealing for home use.
IBM PC compatible computers are similar to the original IBM PC, XT, and AT, all from computer giant IBM, that are able to use the same software and expansion cards. Such computers were referred to as PC clones, IBM clones or IBM PC clones. The term "IBM PC compatible" is now a historical description only, since IBM no longer sells personal computers after it sold its personal computer division in 2005 to Chinese technology company Lenovo. The designation "PC", as used in much of personal computer history, has not meant "personal computer" generally, but rather an x86 computer capable of running the same software that a contemporary IBM PC could. The term was initially in contrast to the variety of home computer systems available in the early 1980s, such as the Apple II, TRS-80, and Commodore 64. Later, the term was primarily used in contrast to Apple's Macintosh computers.
A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term workstation has been used loosely to refer to everything from a mainframe computer terminal to a PC connected to a network, but the most common form refers to the class of hardware offered by several current and defunct companies such as Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, Apollo Computer, DEC, HP, NeXT, and IBM which powered the 3D computer graphics revolution of the late 1990s.
A computing platform or digital platform or software platform is an environment in which a piece of software is executed. It may be the hardware or the operating system (OS), even a web browser and associated application programming interfaces, or other underlying software, as long as the program code is executed with it. Computing platforms have different abstraction levels, including a computer architecture, an OS, or runtime libraries. A computing platform is the stage on which computer programs can run.
Wintel is the partnership of Microsoft Windows and Intel producing personal computers using Intel x86-compatible processors running Microsoft Windows.
Coherent is a clone of the Unix operating system for IBM PC compatibles and other microcomputers, developed and sold by the now-defunct Mark Williams Company (MWC). Historically, the operating system was a proprietary product, but it became open source in 2015, released under the BSD-3-Clause license.
Columbia Data Products, Inc. (CDP) is a company which produced the first legally reverse-engineered IBM PC clones. It faltered in that market after only a few years, and later reinvented itself as a software development company.
The FM Towns is a Japanese personal computer built by Fujitsu from February 1989 to the summer of 1997. It started as a proprietary PC variant intended for multimedia applications and PC games, but later became more compatible with IBM PC compatibles. In 1993, the FM Towns Marty was released, a game console compatible with existing FM Towns games.
Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp., 714 F.2d 1240, was the first time an appellate level court in the United States held that a computer's BIOS could be protected by copyright. As second impact, this ruling clarified that binary code, the machine readable form of software and firmware, was copyrightable too and not only the human-readable source code form of software.
BIOS implementations provide interrupts that can be invoked by operating systems and application programs to use the facilities of the firmware on IBM PC compatible computers. Traditionally, BIOS calls are mainly used by DOS programs and some other software such as boot loaders. BIOS runs in the real address mode of the x86 CPU, so programs that call BIOS either must also run in real mode or must switch from protected mode to real mode before calling BIOS and then switching back again. For this reason, modern operating systems that use the CPU in Protected mode or Long mode generally do not use the BIOS interrupt calls to support system functions, although they use the BIOS interrupt calls to probe and initialize hardware during booting. Real mode has the 1MB memory limitation, modern boot loaders use the unreal mode or protected mode to access up to 4GB memory.
A Macintosh clone is a computer running the Mac OS operating system that was not produced by Apple Inc. The earliest Mac clones were based on emulators and reverse-engineered Macintosh ROMs. During Apple's short lived Mac OS 7 licensing program, authorized Mac clone makers were able to either purchase 100% compatible motherboards or build their own hardware using licensed Mac reference designs.
The Apple II home computer series was frequently cloned, both in the United States and abroad, in a similar way to the IBM PC. According to some sources, more than 190 different models of Apple II clones were manufactured. Most could not be legally imported into the United States. Apple sued and sought criminal charges against clone makers in more than a dozen countries.
The PC-9800 series, commonly shortened to PC-98 or 98, is a lineup of Japanese 16-bit and 32-bit personal computers manufactured by NEC from 1982 to 2000. The platform established NEC's dominance in the Japanese personal computer market, and, by 1999, more than 18 million units had been sold. While NEC did not market these specific machines in the West, it sold the NEC APC series, which had similar hardware to early PC-98 models.
The Amiga is a family of home computers that were designed and sold by the Amiga Corporation from 1985 to 1994.
The Amiga computer can be used to emulate several other computer platforms, including legacy platforms such as the Commodore 64, and its contemporary rivals such as the IBM PC and the Macintosh.
Following the introduction of the IBM Personal Computer, or IBM PC, many other personal computer architectures became extinct within just a few years. It led to a wave of IBM PC compatible systems being released.
MS-DOS is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few operating systems attempting to be compatible with MS-DOS, are sometimes referred to as "DOS". MS-DOS was the main operating system for IBM PC compatibles during the 1980s, from which point it was gradually superseded by operating systems offering a graphical user interface (GUI), in various generations of the graphical Microsoft Windows operating system.
Home computers were a class of microcomputers that entered the market in 1977 and became common during the 1980s. They were marketed to consumers as affordable and accessible computers that, for the first time, were intended for the use of a single, non-technical user. These computers were a distinct market segment that typically cost much less than business, scientific, or engineering-oriented computers of the time, such as those running CP/M or the IBM PC, and were generally less powerful in terms of memory and expandability. However, a home computer often had better graphics and sound than contemporary business computers. Their most common uses were word processing, playing video games, and programming.
The worst days [for game development] were the cartridge days for the NES. It was a huge risk – you had all this money tied up in silicon in a warehouse somewhere, and so you'd be conservative in the decisions you felt you could make, very conservative in the IPs you signed, your art direction would not change, and so on. Now it's the opposite extreme: we can put something up on Steam, deliver it to people all around the world, make changes. We can take more interesting risks.[...] Retail doesn't know how to deal with those games. On Steam [a digital distributor] there's no shelf-space restriction. It's great because they're a bunch of old, orphaned games.