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Comment by huhtenberg | Hacker News Reader

This comment ^ shouldn't be in gray.

It's a cute story, but if a cloner was dumb, he'd copy the the ROM as is and wouldn't care if the icon was hidden or not. A smarter cloner would tweak the code and the resulting ROM image would've likely had different offsets, so typing "<hex-address> G" in front of a judge simply wouldn't work. It doesn't really smacks of paranoia, but it does look like something Steve Jobs would've insisted on.

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I guess the Apple engineers would have prepared the demo and analysed the copied ROM, before going to the court. Then, they would have found the routine (somewhere else, as you point it out) and easy to activate.

Absolutely.

I could see a really compelling demo where they bring out the machine still in the shrinkwrapped box, open it in front of the court, turn it on, and hit the register.

Presumably Apple would be able to disassemble the clone ahead of time and find where the address had moved to.

unless the cloner did major modifications the code to display the icon would still be there and recognizable. It wouldn't take any half competent engineer very long to find the new address to run knowing the exact block of code they were looking for.

Isn't that the entire problem? They neither know its there, or what it is.

He meant a knowledgeable Apple engineer, who would presumably have some time to determine where the routine had moved while the lawsuit against the copier was wending it's way through court.

So, once the modified clone(s) start to get a foothold in the market, release a new version of the OS which checks for the existence of the copyrighted marker:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_ProDOS#Unlicensed_Apple_I...

Thanks for the semantic qualification, I agree completely.

Not paranoid in the usual definition, but quite pertinent to the Jobs ideal.

I guess Apple hoped that the dumb clones would come first, which would help set a precedent.

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