ANTIC Interview 191 - Roland Gustafsson, Print Shop Companion

Roland Gustafsson, Print Shop Companion

Roland Gustafsson wrote The Print Shop Companion, an add-on package for Brøderbund's popular Print Shop software, which added a printable calendar, font and page border editors, and other features. He first developed the program for the Apple ][, then ported the software to the Atari 800 and Commodore 64.

In the retro-computing community, however, Roland is best known for his work on the Apple ][, where he specialized in designing copy protection as well as the RWTS18 disk format, which squeezed extra data onto the Apple's floppy disk.

This interview took place on May 17, 2016.

Teaser quotes:

"There was a guy in Switzerland who would hack into a telephone booth ... He would phone me and talk to me and tell me, 'Oh, your copy protection is great. I enjoy breaking your copy protection more than the games.'"

"The same concepts, where you make a good decision on the design work, the framework of what you're working on, the foundation — still applies today for modern software."

Roland on Twitter: https://twitter.com/rolandgust