For 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.
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.
> It wouldn't even be legal to own or distribute anymore in the post-DMCA world.
Meanwhile it would be explicitly legal in some European states, where people are allowed to make backup copies of software they buy, against anything that the vendor says—and/or to make the software work on their machine.
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.
Can 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.
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.
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.
Whenever 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.
As 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.
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'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.
I 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.
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.
- "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.