
Early Copy Protection on the Apple II - _pius
http://www.fadden.com/techmisc/cassette-protect.htm
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joshu
Neat stuff. I love (now) archaic hardware.

One thing that I've always wondered - does having computers that are vastly
less understandable/accessible mean that kids growing up with them end up
learning less?

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thristian
I think that's the same as "does programming in anything higher-level than
C++/C/assembly/FPGAs make you stupid?" - the answer is usually that kids today
are learning just as much, but about different topics and at higher levels of
abstraction. Understanding the different JavaScript event models of IE and
Firefox is probably just as arcane as understanding both Z80 and 6502 assembly
back in the day, and far more useful to their everyday (hobbyist developer)
lives.

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jaydub
_kids today are learning just as much... at higher levels of abstraction_

When the learning begins at a higher layer of abstraction, some knowledge is
necessarily left-out. Perhaps it is done so for valid reasons such as
relevance as you mentioned. However, to master a point at a high level in any
stack you _do_ need to understand or appreciate the lower levels as well
(which might be harder for kids today).

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eru
So go ahead and learn quantum mechanics.

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rbanffy
Humans can't learn quantum mechanics. Humans can, at best, get used to it.

Understanding it requires at least one brain with at least 8 dimensions and
human brains have only 4. It also helps if your sensory organs are evenly
spread across all 8 dimensions.

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bcl
Awesome article. I cut my teeth on 6502 assembly, cracking games for the Atari
800. We used some of the same techniques.

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JMostert
The perils of DRM were no different back then, except that the term hadn't
been coined yet.

I remember disassembling and working around the tape loader for a game on my
C64 just so I could copy it to disk. I had no intention of sharing it with
anybody, I just wanted to get around the atrocious loading times.

Today I download cracks for the games I buy (no need to write them yourself
anymore) so I can run them without needing to have the DVD inserted. The more
things change, the more they stay the same.

