I was at the Seattle Goodwill outlet recently and noticed the Apple logo on letterhead sticking out from a bin of books, so I started digging. What I found were the 1979-1980 files of Jack MacDonald, manager of system software for the Apple II and /// at the time.
They tell the story of project "SSAFE" or "Software Security from Apples Friends and Enemies." This was a proposal to bring disk copy protection in-house to sell as a service to outside developers. Inter-office memos, meeting notes and progress reports all give a good idea of what a project life cycle looked like. Different schemes and levels of protection are considered, as well as implementation primarily on the Apple II+ and the upcoming SARA (The Apple ///) and Lisa computers. Randy Wigginton is featured prominently throughout, along with mentions of Woz, distribution lists including "S.Jobs" and many other familiar names.
The documents were all a jumble so I've put them in chronological order and scanned the collection.
- 1979-1980 SSAFE Project Memos (116 pgs)
- 9/17/1979 Dr. Gary Boyd letter and paper to Carolyn Stauffer at Apple (12 pgs)
- 11/30/1979 Cryptext Manual and Price Sheet (35 pgs)
- Reference articles on encryption (17 pgs)
- Including:
- July 3 1980 Electronics - Can Software Do Encryption Job?
- Mathematics of Public Key Cryptography - Hellman
- March 1980 Byte
- 10/22/1979 Computerworld
2/23/17 Comments on SSAFE Project Memos from Chris Espinosa:
Twitter @vadermeer
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