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An Apple II Tale
- teddyh 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- LocalH 4y agoPreservation is a fascinating thing
- jonathanoliver 4y agoWhenever these tales arise, I can't help but read them. I know that they're not particularly relevant to anything I do or even have done. Even so, it's like watching an archeological dig.
- notRobot 4y agoAs someone who wasn't introduced to computers until the early 2000s, there's so much jargon in the story that I don't understand that it's a bit difficult for me to follow it. ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
- benjaminpv 4y agoI'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.
- Someone 4y ago> but evidently there was a component or two that had gone bad The disk head got stuck because the head was ‘glued’ to the platter by stiction (https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?t=1051141 https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?t=1051141, https://hardrecoveryman.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/release-of-sticky-hard-disk-heads/ https://hardrecoveryman.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/release-of-...; a fairly common issue in the day for certain brands of hard disk, and he did a quick and dirty ‘repair’, first by trying to get it unstuck through inertia, then by opening the enclosure and forcing the head to get unstuck. He likely did not use a clean room, so that repair probably was temporary. > 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) They ‘just’ booted the disk and used the ProDOS CATALOG command (or its shorthand CAT) to list the files on the disk.
- aasasd 4y agoI nearly fainted reading about how the dude whacked the disk to make the head unstick and then jiggled the head over the platter. One thing I learned in my tech initiation years is that head on the platter = death and woe. Also, judging from how pallets with containers of old stuff were dropped right beside the guys, and how they were going through the hardware by throwing it up in the air, it sounds like the environment was the opposite of clean.
- notRobot 4y agoThank you!
- reaperducer 4y agoThink if it as an opportunity to increase your knowledge, rather than to whine in public and be dismissive.
- notRobot 4y agoI really wasn't whining. Just stating. It's interesting.
- PhasmaFelis 4y agoThey weren't rude or whiny, just stating their experience. This is a really weird thing to get angry about.
- macintux 4y ago> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- chiph 4y agoThe 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).
- notRobot 4y agoThank you!
- blakespot 4y agoI 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.
- notRobot 4y agoI know about IRC but the links are super helpful, thanks!
- boomboomsubban 4y agoFor anyone else like me that was unaware, "gaylord" is a genericized term for a bulk box. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulk_box https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulk_box
- benjaminpv 4y agoI was gonna say, from context it was clear it's some sorta container but I'd never heard it used that way.
- Aloha 4y agoFor years I'd thought it was a universal term - the blank looks on peoples faces when I used it, eventually clued me otherwise.
- ok123456 4y agoIt's also a, not so popular these days, first name.
- reaperducer 4y agoIt's also a, not so popular these days, first name. It remains a very prominent surname in Nashville business. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaylord_Opryland_Resort_%26_Convention_Center https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaylord_Opryland_Resort_%26_...
- boomboomsubban 4y agoThat's where the box got the name, but it was clear the gaylord in the story wasn't someone's name.
- ojhughes 4y agoAlso a common playground insult
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- notamy 4y agoLoading quite slow for me, so just in case: https://archive.ph/AuO4O https://archive.ph/AuO4O
- richardfey 4y agoThe source code has not been released though?
- jagged-chisel 4y agoLatching on here to continue the topic … I wonder if someone might be able to hand it off to the archive.org folks.
- blakespot 4y agoI've just heard a rumor that a very capable, active developer in the Apple II community was handed the source code at some point. That would be nice.
- NegativeLatency 4y agoYeah I was really hoping there’d be a link at the bottom
- thought_alarm 4y agoFor those who aren't familiar with this particular chapter in Apple II history: - "Copy-2-Plus" was the ubiquitous disk copier/disk utility software for Apple II computers in the mid to late 80s. The makers of Copy-2-Plus, Central Point Software, had a distribution deal with VTech, makers of a popular legal Apple II clone, the "Laser 128". - The Laser 128 was a legal clone because because VTech provided a clean-room implementation of the Apple II firmware that was, for the most part, not super buggy. They also legally licensed Microsoft BASIC. The Laser became very popular in the late 80s as VTech was able to undercut Apple's pricing while extending the hardware in ways that Apple was unwilling to do. - At some point in the late 80s, the source code to Copy-2-Plus went missing. In order to keep the lights on, Central Point Software had to re-implement their premier product from scratch. - In the early 90s, a dead hard drive shows up in dumpster of a hardware recycler. This hard drive apparently contained a copy of the Copy-2-Plus source code that went missing in the late 80s, as well as the code for VTech's Laser 128 firmware and Microsoft BASIC. - By fluke, a worker at this recycler happens to notice something about this dead hard drive, fixes it, and discovers all of this missing and/or notable Apple II source code.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bombcar 4y agoThe 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.
- FPGAhacker 4y agoJust to add a little more context, copy-2-plus could circumvent copy protection.
- abeyer 4y agoNotably 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.
- thewebcount 4y agoCan someone who did professional development on the Apple II at the time comment on what it was like? I was doing x86 DOS/Win/Unix development in the mid 90s for a Fortune 500 company, and even there we used some janky home-grown version control system that, if I recall correctly, required us to ftp our changes to some server somewhere. I know Apple had Projector[0] for Mac development with MPW (Macintosh Programmer’s Workshop[1]). Was there any sort of source control for the Apple II? I have to admit it’s somewhat ironic that a company that made disk copying software didn’t have a backup copy of their source code. [0] http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.14/14.06/VersionControlAndTheDeveloper/index.html http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.14/14.06/Ve... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Programmer's_Workshop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Programmer's_Worksho...
- didgetmaster 4y agoI 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.
- palad1n 4y agoSo 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.