Re: Just bought an Apple II

[pausch@saafNOSPAM.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <391C0CCA.607C5E4B@inetnebr.com>,
Roy and/or Janet Miller  <millers@inetnebr.com> wrote:
 
> Paul Schlyter wrote:
> 
>> Which means Apple said OK to everyone who asked to distribute DOS with
>> their software, and didn't care about those who didn't ask?
> 
> They sued the pants off of Franklin Computer for stealing DOS 3.3 and
> the Apple ROM routines.
 
Yes they did, but only because they couldn't do what they really wanted
to do: sue Franklin for making an Apple II hardware clone.
 
And why did Franklin steal the ROM routines?  Well, it was their only
option if they wanted to make an Apple II clone: the ROM routines
were necessary, and Apple would definitely have refused to license it
Franklin.  But Franklin lost and was forced to stop producing Apple
II clones, and once again there was no second source for Apple II
hardware.
 
The clone makers did learn from this though: when PC clones appeared,
they didn't contain a copy of the IBM PC ROM, but instead their ROM's
were written from scratch with the same functionality.  This task was
made easier because the PC world didn't have the habit of the Apple
II world to call hardcoded ROM address directly -- the PC ROM was
called only through software interrupts.  And the clones also skipped
ROM Basic: if there was no boot disk available, the IBM PC would
enter ROM Basic while the clones simply would display an error
message.  Microsoft followed by releasing GWBASIC, a version of
Microsoft Basic which ran without ROM Basic -- the original IBM PC
instead had BASICA (means "Basic Advanced" -- yes it had disk I/O
which ROM Basic lacked), and BASICA made many calls to ROM Basic
routines, and would crash if run on clones without ROM Basic.
 
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But this was another topic.  Franklin sold hardware, not a software
packet.  If Franklin had been a software distributor among other
software distributors for the Apple II, Apple would never have
bothered to sue them.
 
>> Hmmm, interesting.... so legally the user was required to do a reboot
>> each time the user switched to another piece of software on the Apple II,
>> unless he had booted from the original DOS diskette?
> 
> And how did you exit from BallBlazer and load Pinball Construction Set?
 
Yes, I'm fully aware that many games could be exited only by a
reboot.  BTW many of the later Apple II games didn't run DOS 3.3 or
any other DOS version.  Instead they ran their own "DOS", which
usually was little more than a program loader, plus perhaps a few
routines to store high scores/etc on some preassigned copies of the
disk -- in that respect these games didn't use Apple DOS at all
(except the RWTS of course).  These "custom DOS" versions were
necessary in some schemes of copy protection which used half-tracks,
spiral tracks, etc.  Some games even used super-long sectors on their
disks, where only the very first sector was a standard 256-byte
sector: these games didn't even use the RWTS, since they had to write
their own RWTS.
 
Castle Wolfenstein had it's own "copy protection" scheme: it ran a
patched version of Apple DOS 3.1, even though it was released when
DOS 3.3 was available!
 
And all these copy "protection" schemes created a market for the
nibble copy programs: Locksmith, Nibbles Away and friends....
 
>> Did Apple have any plans on how to enforce this rule to be obeyed?  <g>
> 
> See above.
 
Irrelevant -- Apple did this only to Franklin, because Franklin produced
a hardware clone of the Apple II.  THe software-only companies were
left alone by Apple.
 
-- 
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Paul Schlyter,  Swedish Amateur Astronomer's Society (SAAF)
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