[rescue] Apple to ditch IBM, switch to Intel chips

[velociraptor]

On 6/17/05, Phil Stracchino <phil.stracchino at speakeasy.net> wrote:
> William Enestvedt wrote:
> > Phil asked:
> >
> >>Anyone remember when copy protection was REALLY bad back
> >>about the late 1980s?
> >>
> >
> >    What, like requiring you to type in answers from the manual [Sim
> > Earth, I believe -- which, when I lost the manual, I just dug out with
> > ResEdit], or using a colored (non-photo blue?) plastic filter to read
> > some text from a card that needed to be entered to install or launch the
> > game?
> >    Man, those were the days...
>
> Things like that, yeah.  Or ...  Populous, which required you to go to a
> specified line on a specified page in the manual and type in the Nth
> word... only some of them were wrong, and there were only about a dozen
> different words it ever asked for anyway.
>
> But I was thinking more of things like 123 that would ONLY run off the
> original 5.25" floppy diskette, and they'd pulled some funky tricks on
> the diskette (like re-ordering sectors) to prevent you from making a
> backup copy of it.

Oh, yeah.  We had a special board in one of our IBM PS2 computers
at the library to do low-level copies of both 5.25" and 3.5" floppies.
We also had all the "pirating" software for our Apples and other
computers.  That's how we found out Tandy DOS would work on
Zenith computers (or vice versa, can't remember).

We had all this stuff because we "loaned" software for use on our
computers in our library computer lab.  And you can just imagine
the completely ridiculous stuff some of the students pulled...
resulting in non-functional disks.

Those were the days--all software we had in the lab ran off of
floppies.  We were trying to figure out how to install software
on HDs in such a way that the students couldn't copy any of
it off and take it home.

And does anyone remember the name of that software rental
company?

=Nadine=