Early Copy Protection on the Apple II

http://www.fadden.com/techmisc/cassette-protect.htm

by _pius • 17 years ago

30 10 17 years ago

joshu• 17 years ago

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?

thristian• 17 years ago

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.

jaydub• 17 years ago

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).

joezydeco• 17 years ago

The Apple II was kind of special, though. BASIC was available to you within a few seconds of turning the machine on, and it was built-in. The availability of the language kind of prompted you to try things out and explore the system.

I see the learning curve as being a lot higher for kids these days. Computers are more accessible and prevalent, but the amount of effort to get something running, even "Hello World", is much higher.

Someone (was it Bill Atkinson?) once said he wished HyperCard was built into the ROM of every Mac. I wonder what the world would be like now with a whole generation of kids playing with hypertext and simple OO concepts.

brianobush• 17 years ago

Yes, kids now will learn less than we did (my youth was the 80s). They will be taught that low-level details aren't necessary and move on to higher concepts. However, they will have little ideas of hardware and its evolution - like why we have memory cache mechanisms, or what is a boot loader. I still remember writing an sorting algorithm in assembly and feel that my knowledge now is firmly rooted in those my intimate knowledge of those concepts. Though, I still have hope...

rbanffy2• 17 years ago

You know... It's only now that it's archaic. By its time, the Apple II was cutting edge personal computing.

And I second your fear. Most programmers I meet have not but the shallowest understanding of the architectures they write for.

bcl• 17 years ago

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

JMostert• 17 years ago

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.

Early Copy Protection on the Apple II

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