Whoa! My ears are burning!

There actually was a Mac "emulator" for the Atari ST (which everyone called the "Jackintosh" when it came out) first. I didn't agree with the term "emulator" everyone used, since it really wasn't an emulator, but a port of MacOS to the Atari hardware, without Apple's permission. I dubbed this a "Hostile Port".

The early versions for the Amiga worked as well, but eventuall you got versions that ran as a more-or-less well behaved task under AmigaOS. That was pretty cool, if you needed Mac software... you could have Mac and Amiga at the same time. In those days, the Amiga had one of the fastest Mac hard drives, thanks to DMA, available -- dramatically faster than any "real" Mac.

I was a founder of Metabox, along with Andy Finkel (ex-Director of Software at Amiga) and two German businessmen, Stefan Domeyer and Geerd Ebeling. We were originally called PIOS Computer, back in the Mac Clone days. PIOS/Metabox had the first 300MHz Mac Clone shipping -- that should set the coordinated for your way-back machine. We bought the motherboards from UMAX, which also carried the license, and made our own CPU cards (actually designed by Thomas Rudloff).

I was working on a CHRP system, which wasn't terribly easy in the day. It had a separate CPU module, along the lines of what they had planned for the second generation BeBox (not precisely the same, but had they gone forward, it probably would have become so), and we had single and quad processor modules in development, G2 stuff in Apple terms. Future modules could have done G3, G4, or PPC970 for that matter. But Apple did pull the plug before this was finished, and Metabox [rightly] didn't see a viable market in a PPC machine that couldn't run MacOS. Of course, the Mac had over twice the market it has today.

The CPU modules kept selling, and Metabox acquired a US branch, based in Austin Texas, to bring some of this to the US market, but it wasn't expecially good timing, since Apple finally got aggressive with G3 machines.

We had three STBs -- the Metabox 500, based on the PC architecture and OS/2, the Metabox 100, which was an OEM from Teknema/Ravisent, and the never-completed Metabox 1000. That was my design, Thomas joined in later, and we had more people building add-ins for it, like a DVD/DVB decoder. This was roughly DVD-player-shaped. It ran a proprietary, AmigaOS-like OS developed under Andy and one of the Germans, Carsten Scholte(sp), called CaOS. The Amiga coonection was pretty key -- we tapped into numerous, well developed technologies like MUI (OO-graphics), Voyager (a browser), etc. This all ran on a ColdFire 5307/5407, not my top choice for a CPU, but a decent enough CPU if you had hardware for MPEG.

Metabox failed when the management got totally nuts, due to the stock prices rising (my shares, which I couldn't sell then, peaked at about US$5.8 million, but I got out of Metabox in terrible financial shape, with them owing me about $75,000 in salary alone). Basically, they spent money on nutty sponsorships: they tried to create a German basketball league, they sponored Forumla 1 racing, Soccer teams, etc. They bought a small film studio.

Meanwhile, the engineering team wasn't getting paid regularly, as the shares started falling in the fall of 2000. They pulled some maneuvers, probably illegal, that effectively stole all of my and Andy's shares in the company, replacing them with then-worthless, unregistered shares, all without our permission. A year of in-and-out of bankruptcy killed off the positive happenings at the US branch (I was CTO there in late 2000/early 2001, we were getting serious interest in the STB from Blockbuster, Enron, and others... ok, so maybe it was fated, anyway, to fail :-).

They went into another bankruptcy late last year, more of the Chapter 7 than Chapter 11 sort from what I heard, but I don't know the German rules that well. Basically, the management proved, in less successful times, to be a bunch of criminals, stabbing their own partners in the back this way. I'd love to report they're all in jail now, but German law doesn't seem to have much to say unless you're German (they actually have excellent protections for employees - thankfully, most of our crew didn't get hosed).