On Fri, May 20, 2016 at 5:49 PM, Evan Koblentz via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
Herb and I attended Roger Amidon's funeral this morning.
We heard an interesting story from a TDL engineer at the luncheon afterward. Herb said Roger had previously told this story; it was new to me.
As the story goes, TDL's monitor program was called Apple, so they gave Jobs/Woz permission (at the PC'76 conference in Atlantic City) to call their company Apple as long as they didn't make any Z-80 products. TDL then renamed its monitor "Zapple".
I sent Woz a message to ask if he remembers this. Waiting to hear back.
Bonus story #1: "Valdocs" meant "Valuable Documents" and was selected because one of the top engineers (not Roger) was a Scientologist and they used that term a lot.
Bonus story #2: Rising Star (mostly TDL guys) got the Valdocs interface influence from Claude Kagan's famous "Home Reckoner" paper; they hadn't even heard of Xerox PARC.
Roger Amidon elaborated more on this story back at VCF East 7.0 during the panel discussion this link starts at the point he mentions about this, https://youtu.be/eogVAd1qB1I?t=39m59s R.I.P. Dan