"I have been following the discussions about ‘software piracy’ in various publications and I am quite impressed with the arguments about ‘protection’ vs. ‘backupability.’ I'm in favor of the backupists in general. As the King of Siam is reputed to have said, ‘Is a puzzlement!’

I kind of hate to do this, but all of the discussion so far has left out one other part of the problem. I have a PET 2001 with Upgrade ROM. There is a lot of good software out there for the Apple, Atari, and others that I can't just LOAD and RUN. Say I have a friend with an Apple. He bought a $200 program that I covet. If I convert it to PET and use it, I'm a pirate? I certainly won't buy it unconverted and, after all that work, I'm in no mood to pay the producer… After all, he ignored me! I don't know the answer to this searing, burning question either, but I thought I could stir the pot with it.

I'm looking forward to the articles about the 2.1 and 2.5 DOS. Let me throw in one thing that I've learned the hard way. COPYD0 TO D1 doesn't work in DOS 2.5 unless both disks have the same ID! During the copy sequence, if the next source program is cataloged on a different Directory block, you get DISK ID ERROR. In partial answer to M.J. Band, the U3 through U9 commands access RAM locations where you can put disk control programs of your own. If you knew the disk environment. The possibilities are fascinating! For instance, a sort routine could be put in there which would presort the output of your file while the PET did other work. Or maybe one that would recognize only CHR$(13) as a delimiter so you wouldn't have to use all those GETs to recover ordinary text with commas in it. (Make that delimiter an option, I have a program that doesn't put RETURNS at the end of a line, just CHR$(29)s at the beginning. It's in ROM, I can't fix it.)"

R. Vanderbilt Foster