
Stack of Early Apple Memos Discovered in Seattle Thrift Store - paulrigor
http://fortune.com/2017/02/26/apple-memos-seattle-goodwill/
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versteegen
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...](http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Black_Wednesday.txt)

That same story also has Andy working on disk diagnostics.

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kalleboo
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).

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trymas
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?

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ezekg
I now read most articles in Brave[0] because of this.

[0]: [https://brave.com](https://brave.com)

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joshka
Interesting. I just tried brave against this link (with a few reloads) and it
said it blocked 22-24 ads / trackers. UBlock Origin on Chrome blocked 44-50.

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ezekg
Interesting. I use uBlock Origin for Chrome on my iMac, but most browsing I do
is on my iPad, so having Brave ready to go with its ad blocker is a must some
days.

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jaclaz
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 ...

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typetypetype
Or had just been email exchanges.

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

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

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buserror
To be fair, with the macintosh they went completely the other way. You could
customize/translate and do many, MANY things with just ResEdit, and many
'power users' did just that...

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joezydeco
To be more accurate, ResEdit was a tool for developers. It wasn't really
designed for the user to tweak things, but of course that's how things
eventually happened.

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afghsvjklpdfsa
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.

