This guy was incredibly lucky in finding a mostly non-corrupted floppy available for sale. In just a few years the few remaining working floppy originals will cease working and MacApp will end up as just another lost piece of software - unless pirate copies are made.
You can say and think what you want about software piracy, but it's undeniable that it has saved a lot of ancient software and games from ceasing to exist in anything other than our memories. Illegal software/ROM archives have probably done more to keep the revolutionary time of the early computing/gaming history alive than all the legal old-fashioned libraries have done combined.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/248571/why_history_needs_soft...
Thankfully there is very little enforcement of the copyright law on ancient software - and so few developers/publishers are bothered enough by the fact that someone is illegally enjoying, archiving and sharing their 10-30 year old software that they bother issuing takedown notices - that it is effectively "legal", or at least tolerated in the same way as cannabis is in the Netherlands. The fact that it won't actually be really legal until 2040-2060 is totally absurd, and a powerful testament to how outdated and irrelevant the current copyright laws are.
Copyright was extended further and further at the request of powerful interests. It used to be much shorter.
Originally US copyright lasted only 14 years, with a possible extension of another 14 years if the author was still alive and requested it.
Nowadays US copyright lasts until 70 years after the original author's death.
You are correct that the original US copyright law was set to the reasonable maximum of 14+14 years, however that was extended to 28+28 years already in 1909, not exactly a relatively recent development.
In 1976, 35 years ago, it was further extended to 75 years after publication or 50 years after death of author. In 1998 it was extended further to an insane 120 years after creation or life + 70 years.
Even if the copyright length insanity actually only was a relatively recent phenomenon from 1998, I don't see why that would exclude it from the "outdated" term.
I had a magtape of PDP-10 games, but that sadly was lost.
https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-11
I still think that PDP-11 assembler code is a thing of beauty.
Here's the 1977 version of Empire written in PDP-10 FORTRAN, which I did manage to save:
I make an effort to buy old software on eBay when I come across it, archive it in a stable format scan the media, and then store the originals.
It would be nice to see a project (would archive.org host it?) that applied standard archival rigor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archivist) to preserving our computing history.
And FYI the correct expression is "Hear, Hear!" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hear,_hear)
I often think about how incredibly inefficient modern software is given that we've had roughly the same level of productivity software ability (with varying levels of usability) for a few decades now. I distinctly remember my NT4 system of the late 90's, and how it was roughly as productive as my current machine, and I wonder just how much cruft is inside modern operating systems and applications.
As a fellow young person (probably even younger than you), I remember watching this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPnehDhGa14 two years ago when it came out and I remember gaining quite an appreciation for all the work put in over time in Windows and the complexity that it probably brings.
When the spreadsheet software was first brought to market, it produced an order of magnitude improvement in ability to do accounting and calculations with the computer. When digital photography tools like photoshop were introduced, they produced an order of magnitude improvement in ability to do image editing. You can go down the line of categories of software, and pinpoint a rough spot where the order of magnitude jump was made.
We've stopped jumping in the productivity software category. There are no order of magnitude improvements in productivity software. Each year's software release is the equivalent of city sprawl in urban planning. It grows bigger, and contains more, but it doesn't fundamentally improve the "capability".
There are still huge leaps being made in software, but not on the desktop.
Ah, c'mon. WebKit, Linux kernel?
Your average reader will find them inscrutable.
That's just how it is. Some works are simple, elegant and great. Others are hard, deep and also great. It has nothing to do with literature or code.
Let me know if you run into any issues.
(2nd EDIT): I just updated the Pastebin cache with the original author's e-mail address, as it was in the blog. Don't mind me, I'm just the schmuck who HN-ed his server's bandwidth.
Does anyone have a decent mirror?
http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/adobe-photoshop-source-...
Using C for Mac development was a bit of a pain in the early days because of the stack calling differences between Pascal & C (before the declarations were built into all the compiler libraries), the conversion between pascal strings & C strings, and the work arounds to handle Pascal structure unions in C.
http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V...
