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. Since Apple's switch to the Intel platform, many non-Apple Wintel/PC computers are technologically so similar to Mac computers that they are able to boot the Mac operating system using a varying combination of community-developed patches and hacks. Such a Wintel/PC computer running macOS is more commonly referred to as a Hackintosh. Background The Apple II and IBM PC computer lines were "cloned" by other manufacturers who had reverse-engineered the minimal amount of firmware in the computers' ROM chips and subsequently legally produced computers that could run the same software. These clones were seen by Apple as a threat, as Apple II sales had presumably suffered from the competition provided by Franklin Computer Corporation and other clone manufacturers, both legal and illegal. At IBM, the threat proved to be real: most of the market eventually went to clone-makers, including Compaq, Leading Edge, Tandy, Kaypro, Packard Bell, Amstrad in Europe, and dozens of smaller companies, and in short order IBM found it had lost control over its own platform. Apple eventually licensed the Apple II ROMs to other companies, primarily to educational toy manufacturer Tiger Electronics in order to produce an inexpensive laptop with educational games and the AppleWorks software suite: the Tiger Learning Computer (TLC). The TLC lacked a built-in display. Its lid acted as a holster for the cartridges that stored the bundled software, as it had no floppy drive. Emulators Long before true clones were available, the Atari ST could emulate a Mac by adding the third-party Magic Sac emulator, released in 1985, and, later, the Spectre, Spectre GCR, and Aladin emulators. The first three of those emulators required that the user purchase a set of Mac ROMs sold as system upgrades to Macintosh users. Later, multiple emulators were released for the Amiga. Starting with the sales of PowerPC Macs, a CPU emulator to run 68000 applications was built into the Mac OS. By the time 68060 processors were available, PowerPC Macs became so powerful that they ran 68000 applications faster than any 68000-based computer, including any