[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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