Unitron did wind up using 3.5″ mechanisms (which look like those in generic PC clones) but had to build their own floppy drive factory in order to do so. After obtaining their loan, the government was refusing to let them import 3.5 inch floppy disk drives and instead wanted them to adopt locally made 5.25 inch mechanisms instead. “I was a consultant for that team and eventually did most of the Toolbox managers… everything was coded in C, except for some critical device drivers and the QuickDraw emulator which were done in Assembly language.”

noted that marketing tricks like these were a popular way for companies to test public reaction to future products. One machine was running some demo software while the other one was turned off and partially open… I guessed that the open machine, which had a board that was obviously different from Apple’s, wasn’t working yet while the working computer was probably an original Mac and not a clone at all.”ĭe Assumpcao Jr.

“The machines were suspended over a small artificial lake in order to keep the public at a distance. Brazilian programmer Jecel Mattos de Assumpcao Jr., the creator of the Merlin project, described their first public demonstration at the 1985 National Computer Fair: Like many companies, Unitron undertook efforts to drum up publicity for their product while it was still in development ( e.g., vaporware). The machines were suspended over a small artificial lake in order to keep the public at a distance. On the software side, Unitron needed to reverse engineer the Macintosh ROM, which contained the Mac Toolbox routines, and localize the Operating System for the Brazilian market and its Portuguese speaking population.

Macintosh roms.