September 24: Apple Publicly Announces Clones Are Welcome

The concept of clones and licensing had been tossed around at Apple since the Mac was first released, but the idea was resisted. Dark days make for desperate decisions, so CEO Michael Spindler decided to take the plunge and license the Mac OS to other manufacturers.

Apple was hoping for some big boys to jump on the bandwagon, specifically IBM. Those dreams never came to fruition and the clone manufacturers were either start ups or computer makers of decidedly smaller stature.

No one was sure who the clone makers would be, including Apple, when Apple publicly announced that they were going to license six manufacturers to use Mac OS this week in 1994.