(Obligatory: OMG, I'm talking to Paul Lutus!)

Yeah, the Apple II era seems to have been particularly destructive with removing copyright notices in favor of "crack screens" and other drivel. Bleah.

More recently, I've been working on my own Apple II game (really). I'd like to release it fully open source, which makes it particularly challenging to use third-party libraries since open source wasn't really a "thing" when they were written. Some of them (notably old Beagle Bros. disks) have since been explicitly placed in the public domain.

So... I would very much like to have some Electric-Duet-based music and sound effects in my upcoming open source Apple II game. (Yes, I just typed that.) Would you be willing to relicense your amazing player routine under an open source license, or to place it in the public domain? I would, of course, give you full copyright attribution in the scrolling credits screen or wherever you'd like.

The original was copy-protected, I believe, which means it cannot be archived in the standard .dsk format (there are some more complicated formats that represent a disk at a lower level, but they are not very well supported by emulators). In a few decades, the only surviving copies of many 80s software programs will be the ones that were cracked and distributed widely. In this way, crackers and pirates acted as inadvertent archivists.

For what it's worth, the pirated version I had (back in the old days) had your name on it (plus a crack group's name and probably BBS phone number). I remember thinking "Hey, that's the Apple Writer guy, what else did he write?" and that's how I found GraFORTH. Bought Leo Brodie's book and had a blast learning the language, then actually implementing small Forth-like languages for the fun of it. There was a Byte book, "Threaded Interpretive Languages" that gave me several epiphanies about programming in general and language design in particular.

I used Apple Writer for years, until eventually my typing speed increased so much that the program couldn't keep up with me anymore when typing long paragraphs (the word wrap algorithm, that was run after each character, apparently took time proportional to the length of the current paragraph, with a big enough constant that my 1 MHz Apple II started dropping keystrokes regularly despite the program having a 32-character buffer). I eventually resorted to disabling word-wrap while typing, and re-enabling it prior to printing (Control-Z, I think it was). Later, I bought a Zip Chip that increased the computer speed to about 3.5 MHz, and the problem disappeared.

I wasn't using Apple Writer by then, because I had discovered another word processor, a weird, Rube Goldberg contraption called Gutenberg Sr. that used double-high-resolution graphics at a time when few programs did, and had a more powerful markup language (troff-inspired, I found out later), could two two-column printing and had some page layout capabilities, and had great support for printer-downloadable fonts, including user-defined ones. The interface was atrocious but the software itself was powerful.