"Computer clones are keeping customs officials busy," chortles Mort Crim in this 1985 news segment about counterfeit Apple IIs from Taiwan. [via Hacker News] The historical context and flavor is fascinating, as is the raised-eyebrow outrage-'n'-puns cadence of it all.
"They even photocopy the manual, replacing the word "Apple" with the name of their latest piratical product," says reporter Gary Probst as an immediate prelude to solemnly intoning the names. Banana. Orange. Pineapple.
"One of them is known as Citron. That's French for lemon."
I wonder if a motive in focusing on fancy 16-bit machines (such as the Mac) was to move away from something easy to clone. Ironic, then, that the easily-counterfeited Apple II ecosystem that was "destroying" them, as the segment puts it, was Apple's cash cow up almost until the 1990s.
