As most users are aware, the Apple II, II+, IIe, IIc
had a large user base and following that was used for
this purpose (and still does to this day) on this topic.
There are lots of tutorials that are still available
online that explain the process of various techniques
to de-protect the software. This lead to further
knowledge about disk protection used by the companies
and indepth knowledge of the computer and DOS. (and ProDOS)
There were a lot of copy cards, crack cards and software
for this purpose.
But what about the Apple IIGS? As far as I know,
there were no copy cards for the Apple IIGS and the
amount of copy software severely diminished.
It seemed once the platform changed,
the information just disppeared. Or was it the case the
people moved to other computers that were move alluring at
the time of the GS. (Atari ST, Commodore Amiga)
Hello,
I have not heard about copy cards for IIgs either.
It makes sense since the IIGS aim to use 3.5 disk (and ProDOS) based software which does not offer as much as freedom to make wierd things with the drive as the Disk II allowed.
Nevertheless, there are plenty of titles for the IIgs. They are well preserved on Alex Lee's website.
So did the pirates move to other platform?
Or was the GS not interesting enough engagement
as previous Apple II's were.
There are some articles in Computist magazine
but there wasn't the support or amount of
knowledge that previously. I had a friend who
had a GS back in the 80's and he was the only
person I knew. His did worked for Siemens' and
somehow managed to get a machine as came out.
(He also get the first Mac when it was released
also)
I think it is an interesting part of Apple's history
that is not well documented or known about.
Incidently I learnt this about Apple today:-
February 1986
Apple purchases a Cray X-MP/48 supercomputer, valued at about $15.5 million.
The system will be used to simulate future hardware and software architectures and accelerate new product development
I wonder if it is still used today (or perhaps now it is obsolete)
The IIgs was basically DOA the very first day it was released in 1986. Everyone who could look just a little down the road could see that the future at Apple was the Macintosh. Indeed the very next year the Macintosh II was released, the first Mac with color and 6 NuBus slots. That was it for the Apple II.
It kind of makes me wonder why they even released the IIGS.
I think I read where it was a gift from Sculley to Woz to let him design it...
He had left Apple years before, finished his engineering degree, etc. and came back to Apple for a time after Jobs was fired.
The X-MP/48 had a theoretical peak performance of 800 MFLOP/s according to Wikipedia - an iPhone 4 has nearly double the processing power. I doubt it's been in use since the early 90s, but I imagine it would have been very useful when designing potential evolutions of the Macintosh during that time. In 1986 it would have been incredible, just like supercomputers are today!
(An Apple II has a peak performance of between 1 and 3 MFLOP/s, for comparison.)