[continued from part I]
In 1983 I’d started working at a Brazilian microcomputer company, Quartzil. They already had the QI800 on the market, a simple CP/M-80 computer (using the Z80 CPU and 8″, 243K diskettes) and wanted to expand their market share by doing something innovative. I was responsible for the system software and was asked for my opinion about what a new system should do and look like. We already had all read about the Apple Lisa and about the very recent IBM PC which used an Intel 8088 CPU.
After some wild ideas about making a modular system with interchangeable CPUs, with optional Z80, 8008 and 68000 CPU boards, we realized that it would be too expensive — none the least, because it would have needed a large bus connector that was not available in Brazil, and would be hard to import. (The previous QI800 used the S100 bus, so called because of its 100-pin bus; since by a happy coincidence the middle 12 pins were unused, they had put in two 44-pin connectors which were much cheaper.)
Just after the Mac came out in early 1984 we began considering the idea of cloning it. We ultimately decided the project would be too expensive, and soon we learned that another company — Unitron — was trying that angle already.
Cloning issues in Brazil at that time are mostly forgotten and misunderstood today, and merit a full book! Briefly, the government tried to “protect” Brazilian computer companies by not allowing anything containing a microprocessor chip to be imported; the hope was that the local industry would invest and build their own chips, development machines and, ultimately, a strong local market. What legislators didn’t understand was that it was a very difficult and high-capital undertaking. To make things more complex, the same companies they were trying to protect were hampered by regulations and had to resort to all sorts of tricks; for instance, our request to import an HP logic analyzer to debug the boards turned out to take 3 years (!) to process; by the time the response arrived, we already had bought one on the gray market.
Since, theoretically, the Brazilian market was entirely separate from the rest of the world, and the concept of international intellectual property was in its infancy, cloning was completely legal. In fact, there were already over a dozen clones of the Apple II on the market and selling quite well! This was, of course, helped by Apple publishing their schematics. A few others were trying their hands at cloning the PC and found it harder to do; this was before the first independent BIOS was developed.
To get back to the topic, it was decided to send me to the NCC/84 computer conference in Las Vegas to see what was coming on the market in the US and to buy a Mac to, if nothing else, help us in the development process. (In fact, it turned out to be extremely useful — I used it to write all documentation and also to write some auxiliary development software for our new system.)
It was a wonderful deal for me. The company paid my plane tickets and hotel, I paid for the Mac, we all learned a lot. I also took advantage of the trip to polish my English, as up to that point I’d never had occasion to speak it.
The NCC was a huge conference and, frankly, I don’t remember many details. I do remember seeing from afar an absurdly young-looking Steve Jobs, in suit and tie, meeting with some bigwigs inside the big, glassed-in Apple booth. I collected a lot of swag, brochures and technical material; together with a huge weight of books and magazines, that meant that I had to divide it into boxes and ship all but the most pertinent stuff back home separately. I think it all amounted to about 120Kg of paper, meaning several painful trips to the nearest post office.
The most important space in my suitcase was, of course, reserved for the complete Mac 128 system and peripherals. More about that in the upcoming part III.
