[HN Gopher] Apple II Desktop Updated
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Apple II Desktop Updated
Author : rbanffy
Score : 34 points
Date : 2022-09-05 19:45 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.callapple.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.callapple.org)
| chizhik-pyzhik wrote:
| Website seems to be down- archive link: https://archive.ph/Vubie
|
| github: https://github.com/a2stuff/a2d
| xhrpost wrote:
| It feels weird that so much old software from the 80's or even
| 90's and newer has to be reverse-engineered in order to be
| understood. The process almost seems like something an
| archeologist would perform on an artifact thousands of years old.
| But this software likely has people living who actually built the
| stuff and know how it works. I understand not everyone can be
| bothered in life to commit to a project, but surely a phone call
| could be answered occasionally. Is it just that knowing who these
| people are is too difficult or that existing copyright issues
| simply make it unsafe?
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| In my quest to reverse-engineer the Ensoniq Mirage software I
| reached out to one of the original authors, who replied to my
| email and said that while he remembered working on the Mirage
| fondly he couldn't remember any details and no longer had any
| of his notes or paperwork from the 1980s.
| joezydeco wrote:
| It's a sensible reply when you don't want to be accused of
| holding onto IP that you don't own.
|
| I have kept source code from many projects that I've worked
| on but if some stranger asked me for details about any of
| them I'd give the exact same response.
|
| It could also be the complete truth.
| lproven wrote:
| I can well believe that.
|
| I moderated a talk between 4 of the original team members at
| Acorn that wrote RISC OS [explanation below] in the 1980s a
| few months ago. They're all of retirement age now.
|
| Three of them were full of anecdotes and stories and details
| about the company, the machines, the buildings, etc. The
| other could barely remember anything about it; his former
| colleagues were prompting him for details of what he wrote
| about 35Y ago, but he had little idea. Too much other work
| since, he said, and too long ago, and he'd forgotten.
|
| I hang out in various retrocomputing fora for fun, and it
| _amazes_ me the utter nonsense that some people come up with
| from vaguely-remembered things they knew 30Y ago. They don 't
| know that they've forgotten, so they free-associate stuff and
| just make it up, and then many get resentful when their
| wildly wrong answers are corrected.
|
| RISC OS, for youngsters and Americans (where Acorn didn't
| sell much) is the original native OS for the ARM CPU, written
| by the company that developed the CPU and the machine it
| would power. It is still around today, it's FOSS now, and it
| runs on some modern ARM hardware such as the Raspberry Pi.
|
| It is a multitasking GUI OS with a rich desktop, networking,
| internet support, and so on. It ran in from 512kB to 4MB of
| RAM. It was the first ever GUI computer to anti-alias screen
| fonts as standard, to move the whole window when it was
| dragged, rather than a dotted outline and then a redraw when
| the mouse button was released. The OS, its GUI, its core apps
| (text editor, image editor, console prompt, filer, etc.)
| fitted into and executed directly from ROM, that is, _without
| being copied into RAM._
|
| It was also the first GUI with a dedicated panel showing
| icons for running apps, plus a system control menu, a clock,
| and so on -- it inspired the Dock in NeXTstep (which came out
| 2Y later), which both inspired the taskbar in Windows 95
| (which came out another 7Y after that).
|
| And the whole OS was written by about 6-7 programmers, and
| the vast majority of it in hand-coded assembly language.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| In fairness, I've found this also tends to be the answer one
| receives when asking the author of some code from two years
| ago about some important details. Comment your code well,
| kids. Remember to document intent -- the why, not the what.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Assuming that someone has saved the source, you'd have to track
| them down. If it was work for hire, like say at a fruit
| company, that person probably doesn't have the rights to it. So
| you have to go to the lawyers. The fruit company lawyers might
| not actually be able to verify that the fruit company owns it,
| but if they want to try, it will require some effort to find
| the documentation, which will be somewhere in dead tree-based
| archives from the 1980's if it exists at all.
|
| Which is to say that if you can identify the rights holder and
| it's not an individual, you have to convince them to spend time
| and money to release the rights. That they may not be able to
| easily confirm they have.
|
| Or you could grab the binary and disassemble it and figure out
| what it's doing yourself.
| pvg wrote:
| People tend not to remember the details of things they worked
| on decades ago, let alone have access to source code or
| contemporary documentation. Even Jordan Mechner - enough of a
| design-note-taker and packrat to produce detailed retellings of
| his development process many years later misplaced the original
| source to _Karateka_.
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(page generated 2022-09-05 23:00 UTC)