Stack of Early Apple Memos Discovered in Seattle Thrift Store

Cool!

It's interesting to see Randy write, in his memo from 1979, whom he thought would be most competent to break the protection scheme: "should Steve Wozniak, Dick Huston, Andy Hertzfeld each take over 1 hour to break it?" (page 6). Andy Hertzfeld is primary author of folklore.org and one of first ~5 or so people in the Mac team (and was also a friend of Randy), but who's Dick Huston? Well it turns out there is only one story on folklore.org mentioning him:

   Later in the day, I talked to Dick Huston about what had
   happened. Dick was an early Apple programmer who had written the
   boot ROM for the disk controller card, who was an astute observer of
   Apple politics and was friendly with Scotty.

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...

That same story also has Andy working on disk diagnostics.

Relevant: A lot of the documents reference the "SARA" project, which was the code name for the ill-fated Apple III. The Apple III was aimed more at the business market than hobbyists, which is probably why some of the discussion about the copy protection mentions how it doesn't have to be as effective against "experts" (business people are less prone to researching how to pirate stuff than Apple II hobbyists).

Offtopic, but the site is super annoying - auto playing video, and even when you pause it, it restarts automatically on scroll. Shouldn't fortune.com know better?

Side note, if these notes were stored on a (possibly copy protected) floppy disk, or on a 1980-state-of-the-art hard disk it would have been very improbable hat they coud have been discovered ...

> The memos also frequently mention the problem of users altering their programs

Interesting that Apple saw this as a problem that long ago.

Tangential anecdote about Randy Wigginton: At a previous internship at Square, I was very pleasantly surprised to see him commenting on my design document. He really is super cool.