Oral History of Paul Laughton
Ғылым және технология
Interviewed by Bruce Damer, with Len Shustek, on August 14, 2013, in Mountain View, California, X6895.2014
© Computer History Museum
For much of his career, Paul Laughton was a contract software developer. One memorable assignment, when he was working for Shepardson Microsystems in 1978, was the creation of the Apple II DOS file system. Working for Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, with the assistance of a few other Apple employees, he completed the entire project in seven months. In this interview Paul describes that project, and the prior experiences that made him such a perfect candidate for the job.
* Note: Transcripts represent what was said in the interview. However, to enhance meaning or add clarification, interviewees have the opportunity to modify this text afterward. This may result in discrepancies between the transcript and the video. Please refer to the transcript for further information - www.computerhistory.org/collec....
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Пікірлер: 14
Paul, great memory of story. Thanks for the shout out for doing all your punch cards and paper tapes during the Apple DOS project. It was a great time will you and Kathy, Bob and Bill W. Nice to have played a small part in it all
Such a treat. I've been a fan of Mr. Laughton since I read his name in the published Atari DOS source listing back in the 1980s. I was just a kid at the time; now I consider Paul one of the handful of people most responsible for my long and enjoyable career in software engineering. It's great to finally be able to put a face and voice to the name. Thank you, Paul and CHM!
amazing ....
It's because of Woz and this guy (not to mention Wiggington) that guys like me were able to create entire careers around the Apple ][. In my case, selling 5.25" floppy disks launched the first of several businesses, then teaching Apple to a generation of students. Fun days!!
CP/A+ eventually became OS/A+ for the Atari 8-bit computers, released by the remainder of those from Shepardson who went on to Optimized Systems Software (OSS). OS/A+ had interesting divergences as well, there were two families of code. OS/A 2.x (and CP/A) used the code for the Atari DOS 2 FMS for both Atari and Apple, with its linked list sector allocation, 8.3 size filenames, etc... Then there was OS/A 4.x, which took the Apple DOS FMS, with its file types, long character filenames with spaces, and bitmap based sector allocation, and ported it to the Atari 8-bit. It works very well, but nothing else in the Atari world can read the filesystem. OS/A 2.x eventually became known as DOS XL.
Great to see hear and use a product of Paul Laughton. MIT s. Greater.
2:03:05 Why did you cover the branding on the monitor? As if we geeks don't recognize a Commodore 1084S anyway...
1:42:35 I wished they would have went further into this Bill Gates issue complaining he was not getting paid enough for MS-Basic. When he says "It's kind of interesting in retrospect" is he talking about MS current status or the fact they ripped Basic off from Gary Killdal?
Great video, thanks. Funny coincidence that Atari later named their game consoles 5200 and 7800 :-) I feel connected since I wrote own Intel-8080 emulator using great Atmas-II back in 1988 during summer at high school, not having floppy drive but also fortunatelly without any paper data entry... using DIY PLL 4046 tape interface; not very funny though; was builtin CIO system in AtariOS the better thing he noticed?? It was clever, but the peripherals was quite pricey for us at that time, and also not so available; whole game consoles and 8bit market was slowly dying in the world too; Last thing I remeber was disassembling borrowed XF-551 8035 secketed ROM (to reverse engineer floppy SIO protocol) by pushing it into basic-rom -socket of PC/XT in hospital lab where I worked ... quite coincidence, it was plug'n'play ... but then I sold it all to buy 386sx board as replacement of dead PC/AT and fixed EGA display by replacing dead PROM (color-mono switch "feature") by birding-in single 7404 to only invert rgb signals. Golden memories.
One word: BARSBAIT (these being the first letters of each file type that Apple DOS is capable of handling).
How come the RFO Basic for android got this name ? Thanks.
@josesaldivar655
3 жыл бұрын
@Cloud Cartoons Feynman not Ferguson
Some people God put on the earth for just one reason.
@josesaldivar655
3 жыл бұрын
True