Seriously ? They could have just asked. They didn't have to go to all that trouble to recover the images. Not only were there backup disks made at the time, but the images were converted and stored as IFF files after the Amiga's launch. I know a few ex-Commodore people who have signed backup disks from Warhol from the training sessions for Warhol, and from the launch itself. The graphics program he used at the launch was an early beta version. It had a more than a few bugs. Area fill in particular was a problem. Before we launch , we went over with him about what not to do during the launch demo. And of course, he completely forgot during the presentation, and went right for that button. Our rows went entirely silent when he hit that button :-) It was a major relief when the program did the fill and survived. There was a plan B, fortunately, it was unnecessary.

Apparently, recently adopted DOT truth in advertising regulations now require Delta to honor those fares that people managed to book. It's less an enlightened appreciation of PR on Delta's part so much as they had no choice. I bet given a free choice Delta would have made the same decision as Brick.

A few years back, I was in a similar situation; our group wanted to give some money to a couple open source projects that we used and wanted to thank. Donation was the first thing that came to my mind, too. Unfortunately, that could not be justified at the company level. The financial types who ran the company at that point would not accept the company doing a donation for no direct return. They also insisted it be buying "something". That part wouldn't have been too bad, I could come up with something that was pretty close (but not exactly) what the open source projects already had (something like a 'golden master' CDROM including the source control archives) that they could charge us for; it seemed like a good solution; they'd get some money, we'd (hopefully) encourage them to keep improving the project. The sticking point turned out to be that our company management (either legal, finance, or both, I don't remember at this point) insisted on doing up a full contract. Based on our standard contract. That eventually killed the deal. The open source project didn't have a staff lawyer to review and revise the contract, our company lawyers really didn't want to spend the time modifying the contract into something that made sense for this situation; so they made a couple half-assed attempts on modifying the contract, but never got something that anyone on the open source projects would (or should) sign. So the donation really went nowhere. (I did what I could on the department level to thank the open source projects; but it was a lot less than it would have been if the company had gotten behind the effort)

Ah, the Commodore 64. "An elegant computer, for a more civilized age." :-) I still have my C64 prototype, in the VIC-20 case. I wonder if it still works ? I should dig it out and see. One thing about those old, simpler computers; you could really get the feeling you understood the computer and program completely. Except for the occasional oddness in the custom chips, everything was under your control. We (or at least I) lost that along the way.

One of Jack's strengths was that he would listen to the engineers; not just the division heads, but actual line engineers who designed the products.