An Apple II Tale

The era of infinite git mirrors of everything has made people forget just how fragile the source code for so many things was (and still is!) - Microsoft has lost the source for a number of things that still ship with Windows (as evidenced by them doing binary patches at times.

If you have any old equipment, especially if it is of unknown origin, try hard to check it before you wreck it.

Just to add a little more context, copy-2-plus could circumvent copy protection.

Notably C2P was largely so ubiquitous as it was often the only way to copy or backup copy-protected commercial software you purchased. Most software came on (relatively fragile and failure-prone) floppy disks, but they were often copy-protected by way of tweaking low level parameters to the drive when the disk was written, such that data beyond the boot blocks was essentially unreadable to the standard disk read routines. The boot blocks on the disk would load the appropriate parameters before continuing to allow the software to run from what otherwise appeared to be a corrupt or unreadable disk.

C2P gave the ability to tweak those drive parameters yourself during copies, and also came with a library of known software with the necessary configuration provided. Interesting to think that it wouldn't even be legal to own or distribute anymore in the post-DMCA world.

There were rumours that Wordperfect lost their source code of Version 5.0

Is that the same VTech that makes kids toys these days ?

I was gonna say, from context it was clear it's some sorta container but I'd never heard it used that way.

It's also a, not so popular these days, first name.

Also a common playground insult

I wrote my very first program using BASIC on an Apple II. My high school in Oregon bought two of them in 1979 (one for the math dept. and one for the business dept.) and I was one of the few students who had a class in both classrooms during the day. The teachers would let us play on them after finishing our regular class assignments.

Neither one had a hard drive so we had to store all our code on a 5 1/4" floppy. The teachers didn't know much of anything about programming, so us students basically self-taught ourselves how to do simple programming on them using the manual and stuff we read about in magazines.

So it wasn't at a professional level, but I had an Apple ][+ when I was 13, taught myself BASIC and 6502 assembler. Yeah, no one had a hard drive at the time, if I recall. I got good enough at assembler to be able to hack Sensible Speller to bypass the copy-protection call and be able to copy with a normal disk copy. I also won a couple two-liner "contests", which was to write something interesting within 2 lines of input, which maxed out at 256 characters. One for Beagle Bros. (who were the coolest software company around back then) and one for Nibble magazine.

As for source control, I would not be acquainted with that term till a decade later. There was one time that I was writing a program in Apple Pascal (also self-taught) for 17 hours straight--and then the frickin machine FROZE! Hard lesson learned, that I've generally never allowed to happen again.

Yeah, that was mid-late 80s and basically knew more that the teachers how things worked on those computers.

Apple Time Warp has John Romero interviewing some professional Apple 2 developers. Its seemed like mostly very small teams (1-4 people) writing code.

Chuck Somerville's I though was pretty fun. Stewart Smith was a more "professional" going into the game making process.

https://appletimewarp.libsyn.com/

also on youtube (audio only).

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0o94loqgK3CMz7VEkDiIgA

Latching on here to continue the topic …

I wonder if someone might be able to hand it off to the archive.org folks.

Yeah I was really hoping there’d be a link at the bottom

I'm not terribly familiar with Apple ][s either but given the surrounding context it sounds like there was a computer and fixed disk that was sent to a junk sorting center. It was initially thought that the disk they were sent was bad (with the owner having written as much on it), but evidently there was a component or two that had gone bad.

With the author's knowledge and some nearby spare parts he was able to revive the disk and computer and then started looking through its contents by dumping it to the screen (sorta like if you look at a raw hex dump from dd or a tool like Spinrite). From that he realized that the source code for that copying software was on the disk, the source code everyone theorized had been lost.

Think if it as an opportunity to increase your knowledge, rather than to whine in public and be dismissive.

The important part is to know that Copy II Plus v8 source code was lost, and this guy Tony found it on an external hard drive that was in a scrap bin. He got the drive spinning working through some percussive maintenance (a common repair technique of the time - I've done it myself) and found it had the source code. His theory is that the drive had been held by the courts in probate as part of the author's estate when he died, and they threw it out afterwards (it wasn't claimed by an heir or creditor, maybe).

The part about Print Shop not working off a hard drive is likely because a lot of software of the time was heavily copy protected. So he had disassembled it and changed the parts that restricted it to only running off a floppy. He had the skills to do this because he was the author of Copy II Plus, which could copy such protected software (ahem, make local backups).

I have added some potentially helpful links in the text, and a bit of explanation for what IRC is, in an effort to help the uninitiated. I should have done so earlier.