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Comment Made some bucks off PLATO conversions to micros (Score 1) 162

In the early '80's I made good money from CDC for a few years by converting PLATO ed games to every micro under the sun - Atari 800, TRS-80, Apple II, C-64. My partner Mike Johnston and I bankrolled development of our game ChipWits with money we saved from those contracts. The games we ported were pretty dry - Decimal Darts and such.
Patents

Apple Attempts to Patent Pre-Existing Display Software Idea 256

Nuclear Elephant writes "Apple appears to be taking ideas from commercial software already being sold and is attempting to patent the concepts as their own. According to Apple Insider, Apple has recently filed a patent application for a notification screen on the iPhone. The only problem with this is that Intellisync has been using this concept in their popular iPhone notification screen software for over a year now, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that this is a clear rip-off. Apple recently became famous (or infamous) for stealing other people's ideas when they rolled out their Dashboard in Mac OS X, which had many similarities to a desktop widget program named the Konfabulator, which later became Yahoo widgets. The case here isn't a simple hijacking of an idea, however — Apple is applying for a patent on Intelliscreen's concept, which could be detrimental to the original manufacturer of the software, who is actively selling it for Jailbroken iPhones"

Comment The Mac was a revelation (Score 2, Interesting) 142

Twenty-five years, dang. That went fast. I wrote my first commercial game on the Mac in '84 - ChipWits - and remember the feeling of being dazzled again and again by all the neat goodies in the Mac OS. Especially resources - when I discovered how to store bitmaps as resources I thought I'd gone to developer heaven. Developing on the Mac that first year was like a treasure hunt because the doc was poor and communicating with other developers was difficult. Most Mac developers wrote their software on a Lisa but I was too poor for that so I used the native MacFORTH. Andy H was one of the stars of the Mac world. His Switcher, which allowed multiple programs to run (sort of), was a neat hack.

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