Even Apple Used Pirate Tools

Another piece of past fun, as posted on GEnie and reproduced in the GEnieLamp newsletter:

>>> WHAT’S HAPPENING IN THE APPLE II ROUNDTABLE? <<<
“”””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””
~ September 1, 1994 ~
//////////////////////////////
APPLE ANECDOTES /
/////////////////////////////////

True Stories
“”””””””””””
by Dean Esmay

I’ve never told this story publicly, but I figure it’s long enough ago, and Apple’s interest in this Apple II stuff is behind us, so what the heck.

A few years ago we got a license to distribute the DOS 3.3 System Master on-line, which we hadn’t had before. So the disks were mailed to us, straight from Apple Licensing.

So I get this really nice package from Apple with the nice white disk envelopes and labels and stuff. And just to make sure everything’s kosher, I boot the System Master that they sent us.

Well, it boots into DOS 3.3… and up comes an old copy of Locksmith, the ancient Pirate’s Favorite in the heady days of the DOS 3.3 Apple II world.

I’m really not kidding. I looked over the disk carefully and that’s all it was… a copy of Locksmith. On a write-protected, Apple labelled disk that Apple Licensing sent straight to us.

What’s doubly funny is the original Locksmith was copy protected, so this means that somewhere in Apple’s history, someone either “cracked” this or accepted a pirate copy.

When we got it we realized these people had no idea what the heck they were doing when it came to Apple II stuff. So we quietly uploaded another copy of the DOS 3.3 System Master we had lying around, and that’s what’s up there in A2 today.

I wonder if I still have that disk? I’m pretty sure it’s buried somewhere in my huge collection of 5.25 disks, gathering dust.
🙂

(A2.DEAN, CAT13, TOP12, MSG:102/M645;1)
reprinted from the A2Pro RoundTable (8 October 1993)