Early warnings

Once upon the time I was browsing through a book which disassembled the Amiga Kickstart-ROM (well I don't remember it's name but it was long before the very nice Amiga Guru-Buch came out). What I saw there, immediately caught my  attention. If the filesystem on a new mounted filesystem had a specific problem it would try to load a program to fix it. The interesting point was, that it first tried to load from that filesystem! If it couldn't find it there it tried the system-partition. Some hours later I had a floppy that upon inserting it into your Amiga immediately showed a very nice custom Guru-Meditation. I showed this floppy to a friend of mine who was astonished as well because the Amiga had no known feature to automatically start a program upon inserting a floppy. It was very hard to keep it from starting it. Luckily viruses where more a theoretic thing at that time. We had copy protection on our mind. It would be very funny to start the game immediately upon inserting the disk.

WX

I just remember that the Motorola 68000 build into the ATARI-ST had a very small cache. It could be used for a funny trick to hinder the debugger. If you just wrote the next instruction with a move the 68000 executes the instruction that was there before. But if you used a debugger you would execute the new instruction. Obviously you had to make sure that no interrupts occurred.

C64 on steroids

In the early 80th I codeveloped with Klaus Roreger the Floppy-Speeder Professional-DOS. See
http://www.d81.de/ProfessionalDOS/Hardware/roms.shtml
I don't remember the exact timeframe. It must have been before 1985. Wow that was really funny. I remember looking "alien" for the first time and talking with Klaus Roreger about how to get around this (at that time) expensive bit shifting. So we came up with the idea of a latch that is automatically filled with current low order 4-Bit and could be used in the next access. See http://www.d81.de/ProfessionalDOS/Hardware/electronic.shtml#Function. It was really funny to read this after all those years. And some guys really put very much energy into documenting it. We had no debugger at that time to debug the C1541. No emulator for the hardware. Just do it. Developing software got so much easier today.