25 minutes to do a copy? I remember it taking about 45 minutes per disk to do a backup copy.

I also remember having to break out the oscilloscope every time I played F-15 Strike Eagle and Psi-5 Trading Company to re-align the disk head. Until a friend gave me cracked copies, which allowed me to simply play the games. (By that time I had purchased two copies of Psi-5, after the first disk refused to recognise itself as a valid copy!)

Worst copy protection I ever encountered, until Lotus 123 came along.

Heh, next time I hear someone talk about how wonderfully optimized all code was back "in the days" and how wasteful we all are now, maybe I'll send them this article, referring to the shipping software on the 1541.

> Back in the 80s, the Commodore C-64 had an intelligent floppy drive, the 1541, i.e. an external unit that had its own CPU and everything.

I remember by the time I got a floppy drive for my C64 it was twice the price of a new C64, $400 vs $200. It was a real luxury item in those days.

Obligatory link to Michael Steil's The Ultimate Commodore 64 Talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsRRCnque2E

I remember FCopy and its successors (esp. FCopy++) with fondness from my childhood. In those days many heated discussions arose around which copy program was fastest, most accurate, or, ah, most "useful" when it came to "backing up" games :-)

now, if only someone could finally reveal to me what "hullabaloo mode" did in Fast Lightning, a disk copy program for the Amiga...

I really think we have lost something since those days since a computer you can program cannot be gotten in the under $200 category.

// I suppose somewhere there is an example, but nothing I've seen in a big box store

A major takeaway from this story is that among the many innovations we can thank Apple for, one of the largest is finally creating a platform, mechanism, and support framework that allows individual developers the ability to be recompensed for their intellectual creations.

It's also nice to see competition creating variants of it on other platforms as well - so you can get the advantages of both a open platform (Android) and versions of Apple's App Store from Google and Amazon.