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A Seattle Redditor caught a glimpse into the early days of Apple during a trip to Goodwill.
Reddit user “Vadermeer” claims to have found a stack of internal Apple memos during a visit to a Seattle Goodwill thrift store.
“Inter-office memos, meeting notes and progress reports all give a good idea of what a project lifecycle was like,” Vadermeer said in a Reddit post made last week. “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.”
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Here’s how Fortune writer David Z. Morris describes the correspondence:
“The conversation revolves around Apple’s efforts to enter the market for business software. (Apple employee No. 6 Randy) Wigginton writes in an August 1979 memo that to do that, the company has to have a method for preventing piracy. The project, headed by Wigginton, was dubbed SSAFE, or Software Security from Apple’s Friends and Enemies.”
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Vadermeer scanned and uploaded the 116-page trove, which includes handwritten notes made in 1979 and 1980.
There’s no indication given as to how the notes ended up at the thrift store. Vadermeer said they were in a bin full of books and appear to have been from the files of Jack MacDonald, a project manager at Apple during the Cupertino, California company’s beginning.
Seattlepi.com reporter Levi Pulkkinen can be reached at 206-448-8348 or levipulkkinen@seattlepi.com. Follow Levi on Twitter at twitter.com/levipulk.
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