Submitted by The Computer History Museum (CHM) announced today that it has, with the collaboration of the Digibarn Computer Museum and with permission from Apple Inc., posted the historic original 1978 source code for the Apple II DOS “Disk Operating System.”
Pretty cool. More on the Apple II can be found at the Computer History Museum’s blog.
Now let’s return back in time, spoof Apple before Apple, hire Woz and Jobs and rewrite history !
Dr Devil
Edited 2013-11-13 11:11 UTC
Ugh, I can’t imagine having to have Jobs as an employee back in the days when he was only eating fruit, not bathing, back stabbing ( see the atari incident with the breakout bonuses), and arrogant as hell. I’d much rather work for him than visa versa.
What!? And miss an unique occasion to be the second one *ever* to have the pleasure to fire Steve Jobs from Apple!?
Noway. Gimme that time machine right now!
You’d have to put up with him for a little time between the interview and the firing, in order for it to really count as a fire rather than a not hire. That’s not worth it.
I’d rather deal with him when he was a little more manageable, say with NeXT.
Here’s a good link for it…
http://classicgaming.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Articles.Detail&id=3…
Be more fun to just mess around with history and do what we did to a friend of mine who went 3 weeks without bathing, jump him with a bottle of dish soap and a garden hose with Woz.
Would have been more interesting (and probably game changing) if someone had talked Nolan Bushnell into not selling Atari to a bunch of morons that caused the great video game crash.
Who knows, maybe we would all be using Atari or Microsoft products instead of Apple and Microsoft. The Amiga probably would have been owned by Atari as well (seeing as how Jay Miner left Atari because they wouldn’t see toward the future and allow him to develop based on the Motorola 68000. The way early Atari was, I think all the early engineers were encouraged to do what they do best, engineer things!)
There are definitely a lot of what ifs.
So the real question for this topic… is there anything useful in this source? Or at least something to say to modern software engineers “let’s don’t or do follow what went down so long ago…”?
Could be useful if any of it can be used to prove prior art and kill a few more Microsoft patents.
Lorin,
“Could be useful if any of it can be used to prove prior art and kill a few more Microsoft patents.”
It’s very unlikely there is anything there that’s both relevant and doesn’t already have prior art elsewhere. But hypothetically yes. Theoretically it could even invalidate apple’s patents too.
http://www.macnn.com/articles/13/09/27/jobs.himself.showed.off.tech…
Would downvoter care to elaborate what was wrong with my post? Which point do you have a problem with?
1. It’s very unlikely there’s anything relevant to modern patents (any patents that were relevant to appleII would probably have expired by now).
2. This technology is so old that there is likely to already be lots of other prior art against modern patents that would be just as effective in overturning them (on the assumption they are relevant to begin with).
3. Prior art can invalidate patents even if the prior art is the same company holding the patent. I even linked an incident where it already happened to apple themselves.
Patent Slayers arise !
Kochise
Kochise,
If you could only pick one of the two, wouldn’t you choose woz?
Well, I’d hire Woz with a strict no flying planes section in his contract.
It’s a matter of alchemy I bet. You cannot get Apple without one of its component : Woz as hardware and software designer, Jobs as envisioning leader. See Apple when Jobs was fired : Apple declined with no vision, Next was pretty good with some other pretty good techies but no Wozniak in sight.
I really think that one of the main talent of Jobs : finding the right profiles to do the jobs… <- pun intended !
Another one I see similar in vision, but more versatile in products, is Sir Richard Branson.
Kochise
Gabe Newell from Valve also seems to be a man with the plan.
No idea if it works out, but you can’t be successful with at least some ideas:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td_PGkfIdIQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhgOqyZHBIU
I’d rather return back in time, spoof Be Inc., hire Jean-Louis Gass~A(c)e and make BeOS big!
I like that OS much more than any OS Apple has made, including latest Os X.
Please note : Apple II had no floating point support, BeOS had no network stack (before Dano)
Both OS were lacking of a major feature by their time
Kochise
BeOS did have a network stack, just not in its kernel, which was what Dano introduced…
Maybe *not* hire JLG then
How about PFS:Write (maybe that was atari?.
The amount of brain ram i’ve used to hold computer knowledge since 1985 is intense. I wouldn’t be surprised if I started up and launched my 25 years old boxes and remembered passwords and logins.
I mean I hope I wouldn’t – but it would be an interesting test. Could you log into your 80’s or 90’s systems right now?
I have an Atari 130xe from 86 that will still run, with floppy drive and atari-basic. That thing didn’t even have passwords. But when I got 1200 baud I went on early 1986 internet, that was probably my first password.
Awwww, my first password, my first security baby…
haha just realized that my first stop on the freenet in 86 was browsing and posting on a library server in northern europe. here i am 27 years later on OSAlert, almost the same thing.
nerd question – what baud am i connected at now? i have 25 Mbps into my pad. someone do the translation for me plz
Edited 2013-11-14 16:59 UTC
That would be equivalent to a 24414 KBaud modem. Basically over 435 times faster than an old 56K modem
cool thanks. i’ve gone from 300 to 24,414k baud. 83x improvement. my very first (gifted) modem had the cradle, aw yeah!
imagine waiting 25 minutes to download 60 seconds of useless video, we would have so much less useless video
Definitely – as a person suffering from an eidetic memory it’s not really a big challenge.
Getting programs running with “cryptic commands and computer gibberish” was probably that time’s home computer password lookalike. I have an Atari 800 XL (among many other technology from the “stone age” of IT where IT wasn’t even called IT) which is still fully functional. I’d be interested on how much of today’s “modern” technology would still work in 10, 20, or 50 years, and if people living then would still be able to operate it – I mean, without holographic control, voice input and brain plug.
Some things never change:
http://www.masswerk.at/googleBBS/
Or if you are totally insane:
http://www.masswerk.at/google60/
This meets my preferences a bit more than “cheap stuff you can have at home”.
You have of course infite baud because you use a modern consumer device, and everyone knows they’re wireless and therefore unlimited.
Those links are amazing — I love the old Google’s!
I remember the 80’s version, of course, not of google, but that was like gopher servers, very cool.
The 60’s version was awesome too – I’ve read some books about 60’s computing and that was about the closest I’ve come to actually operating one of those beasts!
thanks for the links, very cool.
I would be great to build a hardware emulator of the Apple ][.
Most software was pretty small, certainly by today’s standards. You could fit a HUGE amount of applications on a single SD card.
My Commodore 128 reads software from an SD card and it’s great.