DayStar Digital

» see daystar.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Andrew Lewis started DayStar Digital in Georgia in May 1983 as a contract shop that assembled circuit boards for other people. In 1986 it put out its own first product, a memory upgrade for the Macintosh, and the year after that it began selling processor upgrades for the Mac II. From then until the middle of the nineties that was the whole company: boards that went into the slot on your motherboard and made an expensive computer you already owned faster than the one Apple was currently selling.

A board shop in Flowery Branch, Georgia had no path into my life at all. Macs in Turkey in the nineties were studio machines, the thing a prepress house or an advertising agency owned, and the home computer in an engineer's apartment was a PC clone put together from parts. An accelerator card for a Macintosh was a product for people who already had the expensive problem.

The reason it gets a headstone here is the two years at the end, when Apple briefly let other companies build Macintoshes and DayStar built the strangest one.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the speed shop ~

The product line reads like a map of the Motorola years. FastCache arrived with the Mac IIci in 1989 and held 64 KB of level 2 cache, twice what Apple's own card offered. PowerCache put a 68030 on a card at up to 50 MHz, and Turbo 040 repeated the trick with a 68040 and 128 KB of cache. Power 601 let a few 68030 machines jump to PowerPC without buying a new computer.

DayStar became a favorite of the Mac press, which covered upgrade companies closely because its readers kept expensive machines for years. It collected most of the awards going for peripherals and it kept relationships open with Apple and IBM at the same time, which in the early nineties was a difficult trick for a business with 175 people in it.

~ the genesis mp ~

In 1995 Apple started licensing the Macintosh to other manufacturers, and DayStar took one of the licenses. What it built was unlike anything Apple shipped: the Genesis MP, a tower with two or four PowerPC 604 processors in it, co-developed with Apple and sold by nobody else.

The catch was that the Mac OS of that era could not schedule a thing onto a second processor by itself. Software had to be written for DayStar's own multiprocessing support to see the extra chips at all, which Photoshop was, through a plug-in that Adobe ended up writing support notes about. Everything else ran on one processor and left the others sitting there. People who bought one were buying a machine for software that had mostly not been written yet.

~ when the license stopped ~

The licenses Apple granted covered System 7. When Mac OS 8 came, Apple declined to extend them, and that single decision ended the clone program for every company in it. Power Computing sold its license back and stopped. UMAX held on longest. DayStar, whose entire business had become the Genesis line, had the least room to turn.

~ the georgia filing ~

The company was still a corporation on paper for a while after the hardware stopped, and the Georgia Secretary of State's registration records it dissolving in July 1999. There was no announcement to speak of, and daystar.com today belongs to a television ministry in Texas, which bought a good domain and owes the Macintosh nothing.

The Genesis MP keeps turning up on lists of the most influential Macs ever made, which is a peculiar fate for a machine Apple did not build and did not want built. It is the only time anyone sold a Macintosh with four processors in it, and the firm behind it was gone less than four years after it shipped.

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