capitain.pad@nixpbe.uucp (Pit Capitain) (03/05/90)
To anyone who's been interested in the shareware mac emulator... Apologies that you didn't hear anything from me for months, but I've been too busy with my `real' work. Here's the state of the project: I decided NOT to release the 64K version, mainly because there was almost no interest in the emulator (at least on usenet). I got something around 40 answers :( I also realized that most of the software on MacWorld's top ten list requires the Plus Roms to run without patches, so I think of Aladin as a good piece of work, but to be realistic, with only 64K Roms it's an out-of-date piece of work. I'm still planning to re-design the emulator and to support Plus Roms, mainly for my own usage. I don't know if I'll have time to do it and when it will be finished, but if it is, I think I will release it as shareware, maybe together with source code, but - again - I don't know when I'll do it... In an old message Dave Small wrote: > If I may ask -- can the story of the development of Aladin be told? > I remember the name Mathias Greve, and something about two brothers who > did the original product; I'm not familiar with the shareware offerer's > name. I'd like to hear it if you'd care to tell it. Here it is: since the first day I heard of Apple's Lisa, I was fascinated of its user interface. But as a student, I never have been able to buy one, even after the release of the Mac. (In Germany, Apple's prices are much higher than in the US.) Some guys near my home town (two brothers, Matthias and Michael Greve) had kind of rich parents and bought a mac in '84. At first, I wasn't able to look `into' the Mac - with only MacPaint and MacWrite at hand, but then came Microsoft Basic! Now I could write a program like the Apple ]['s monitor rom, and I was able to get a disassembled listing of the 64K roms and of the system files. I started to comment this listing, which has been hard in the beginning, but Apple released more and more information about the Mac's internals, finally `Inside Macintosh'. By the time, I got a very thorough knowledge of the Mac's OS. The Greve brothers (the Mac owners) had a small software company named `ProficomP', trying to sell some Apple ][ games, without much success. They got the idea of a 2MB battery powered memory board for the first 512K Macs. I wrote the software for this board, that allowed to use part of it as a ramdisk, from which you could boot the system - this saved hours(!) of time, because back then there was no harddisk... Soon before we were ready to ship the board, Apple release the Mac Plus, with 1MB of memory and hard disk support. :( In the meantime, Atari released the ST, claiming it to be a `Jackintosh' but I didn't like it's OS. However, the hardware and the price was great! I told the Greve brothers of my idea to port the Mac's OS to the ST. After some arguing on the pro's and con's, I could convince them that this could be a promising idea. To reward me for the unsuccessful memory board project they bought me an Atari ST, so I could realize my ideas, and they wanted to market the final product. Three months before we wanted to ship, we heard of Magic Sac. After the first shock we thought of it as a good test for the reactions of Apple. (We were convinced, that our product would be better. Sorry, Dave :) Apple showed no interest in the Magic Sac, so we started shipping, too. Well, the rest should be known. After 3 months with very, very rapidly growing sales, Apple took us to court for the first time, with the result that we had to stopp selling Aladin in Germany. We still could sell it in the rest of Europe, and there were enough companies out there, who sold Aladin back to Germany again. After the second lawsuit with Apple in '89 though, the Greve brothers decided to stop selling Aladin. I hope not to waste bandwidth, but I'd like to add some personal remarks on the Aladin history: since the beginning of the product, the Greve brothers thought of Aladin as their product. Everybody (like Dave) knew them and the name of their company, but not me. I simply was the `programmer'. Yes, it has been my fault to tolerate this, but I hoped for the future to change this. I always had trouble with the Greve brothers to get my part of the company's income. That was the reason why I decided to quit the development of Aladin in '88. I never could tell at the end of a month whether I could pay the rent for my appartment or not, and my wife and I didn't want to live like that. I went to Nixdorf, a German computer manufacturer and started working on UNIX, what I'm doing still. Until mid '89, however, I also worked on Aladin at home, just because the Greve brothers had no one else who really was able to make major imrovements to Aladin. Now I'm really out of the Aladin business. A couple of weeks ago I had to go to an attorney, because the Greve brothers don't want to pay me my part of Aladin's income in '89. There's a German proverb, meaning "friendship ends, when it comes to money", and that's just a description of the development of our relationship. Sounds a bit like resignation? That's true. I really never thought, that it could come that far, but it seems to happen more often than I thought, if you remember Dave's trouble with Data Pacific. > If any of the makers of Aladin ever make it to Denver, please > give me a call, okay? Let's go get a beer. Dave, you should be careful offering (US-)beer to a German, many of them don't like something else than German beer :) but you can be sure, that I'll give you a call. I will be in Boston and San Francisco by the end of the year, but I don't know if we make a stop in Denver. We'll see... Pit +-----------------------+---------------------------------------------------+ ! Pit Capitain, DX-PC ! US: ...uunet!philabs!linus!nixbur!capitain.pad ! ! Nixdorf Computer AG ! not US: ...{mcvax!}unido!nixpbe!capitain.pad ! +-----------------------+---------------------------------------------------+
ericco@stew.ssl.berkeley.edu (Eric C. Olson) (03/07/90)
In article <1345@nixpbe.UUCP> capitain.pad@nixpbe.uucp (Pit Capitain) writes: >> If any of the makers of Aladin ever make it to Denver, please >> give me a call, okay? Let's go get a beer. > >Dave, you should be careful offering (US-)beer to a German, many of them >don't like something else than German beer :) but you can be sure, that >I'll give you a call. I will be in Boston and San Francisco by the end of >the year, but I don't know if we make a stop in Denver. We'll see... > > Pit Well, if you're in San Francisco (with DS perhaps), you should definitely take him up on his beer offer. We have many european converts here. A particularly good site is the Triple Rock Brewery on Shattuck Ave in Berkeley, California (the other side of the Bay). Eric Eric ericco@ssl.berkeley.edu