Re: Just bought an Apple II

[pausch@saafNOSPAM.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <228_200005110843@juge.com>,
Bruce Baker <Bruce.Baker@juge.com> wrote:
 
> You certainly can post newbie questions here.  You could get a system
> disk but what you really need to do it simply buy programs, or get
> programs.  Most will simply boot from a floppy disk, they will carry
> the OS on the disk.
 
It's interesting that it was so accepted among the Apple II community
to spread pirate copies of Apple DOS like that -- not even Apple
Computer ever seemed to mind!  In the CP/M world, the situation was
drastically different: NO softare packages carried the CP/M system on
the system tracks of the diskette, and the documentation made it
explicit that was because the software authors didn't want to violate
the copyright of Digital Research.  So the user had to put CP/M on
the system tracks himself.  It was more urgent to have CP/M on all
CP/M diskettes than to hape Apple DOS on all Apple DOS diskette,
since the CCP (the command processor of CP/M) was allowed to be
overwritten by applications, and when that happened, it had to be
reloaded from disk when the apllication terminated.  And this would
fail if CP/M was absent from the system tracks.  Apple DOS was never
reloaded from the system tracks, so it was really not needed except
on the boot diskette.
 
-- 
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