🚀 go-pugleaf

wh...@unix.cis.pitt.edu (William H Broadley) writes:

> In my highschool we had Apple II's and frustrated students would repeatedly
> hit and hold the reset key numerous times.  It eventually produces a dump
> of ROM or something. Shortly afterwards smoke starts coming out of the
> machine...

 Well, that fits the legend category nicely. It isn't true, but it sounds
neat. :-} In an original ][, the reset key was selectable for if one
wanted to press just reset or ctrl-reset so that part is OK. On the
][, hitting reset would drop you into the monitor (where you could
stroll through the address space and do fun things). Not exactly a dump
of ROM, and no smoke. You could stroll through and disassemble the ROM
if you wanted to though (still no smoke). The difference between the ][
and the ][+ (besides the switch from int basic to fp basic, which included
the 'auto-start' code) was that the reset vector on the ][+ was programmable
(it wasn't on the ][) so pressing reset could have a wide variety of results,
from nothing to rebooting to clearing memory and freezing up the machine.
This was a concession to the software producers, with the non-programmable
reset vector it was simplicity itself to do anything one wanted to to
programs. Copy protection was truly impossible, as one could reset and
grab their RWTS routines (not that copy protection was impressive back
then, with Apple DOS 3.2 (3.1 was very short lived) the copy protection
was usually a bad or unformatted sector, which stopped the copy programs
of the day cold) or if it was a program that was complete in memory just
grab it. There wasn't much software to be had back in '77-78, but we
had control over the machine (and a whopping 16k if one were rich).
That reminds me, the disks 'knew' how much memory was in the machine
they were formatted on, which had some interesting applications. One
could edit the disk and use memory above what the loaded copy of DOS
thought was there to play with.

 I wonder why I spent so much more time doing this kind of thing back
then than I do now... 

---
Grant DeLorean              ...osu-cis!n8emr!bluemoon!grant
                            ...towers!bluemoon!grant
   (and  grant@bluemoon  when I finally get in the current maps)
++Being self employed, my opinions are remarkably similar to my employers.

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