[vcf-midatlantic] TDL / Apple story
Evan Koblentz
evan at snarc.net
Fri May 20 17:49:17 EDT 2016
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.
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