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Another interesting side effect of Apple DOS is the extraordinary fertile ground it created for software companies to copy-protect their applications.

Piracy was already a big deal back then and pretty much every single software publisher on the Apple ][ had developed their own copy protection mechanism by simply hijacking the low-level vectors of Apple DOS.

Some of these copy protections were quite frankly amazing in ingenuity.

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I spent so many hours watching The Locksmith [1] go "Read..." "Analyze..." "Write..." nibble by nibble, sector by sector.

[1] ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II/documentation/applications/misc/Locksmith%20User%20Manual.pdf

well I guess I will admit to the hours friends and I spent hacking out Wizardry and other games. Wizardry was a pain because it was in effect booting its own runtime, a pascal based one at that. (think it was wizardry that did this). Between the days of NDD on PCs and messing with code on Apple ][ I never realized how much my love for programming was being developed

Yes, Wizardry was the first game to ship that was written in Pascal UCSD if I recall correctly.

The boot sequence was pretty unmistakable (clear screen, switch to 80 columns, cursor in the upper left corner) but quite novel at the time.

Here it is, if you want to experience it yourself:

http://www.virtualapple.org/wizardrydisk.html

The strategically-placed hole-punch through the diskette will always be my favorite.

My own favourite was the quarter track 'spiral' protection! It was amazing, and sounded so cool :-)

When I worked in that area for Apple][ copy protection we had a separate card that was plugged into the expansion bus.

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