The Apple II history series by Steven Weyhrich is wonderful if you’re a fan of knowing minute details about the various Apple II models. Having started my Apple II experience with the IIe I learned a lot about the models that came before. I was surprised and pleased at the level of technical detail he went into.
I was kind of expecting this to be about the fact that beginning with the Apple ][ and running up to (and maybe even a little past) the introduction of OS X, text files on Apple computers used ^M as the line delimiter as opposed to ^J on Unixes and ^M^J on DOS.
Cracking has changed a lot, but also not so much. I love how the basic form is: let the target program load into memory then dump it to disk. Basically the same idea applies to older software protections like ASPack...find the original entry point (where the original executable is loaded up without protection), steal a few bytes to jump to a code cave, and patch whatever you want to patch from the code cave.<p>also, memory dumpers that can rebase an exe from memory given the original entry point
Related discussion (and well worth reading, including site owner's DEFCON talk)
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22995008" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22995008</a>