here in California there were zero instances of "flashing a ROM" among ordinary developers -- it was obviously illegal (maybe a reason) but also you just buy a Mac and get the rom image.. Macs were everywhere... fifty percent of the Macs in the world were in this area, by some measures at some time.
This was the nightmare of Apple from the early days and they actively pursued it. Also, intelligent people in the creative professions were inventing things.
Hmm. You seem to be railing against something that is not related to the article. The article describes how Apple internal developers reflashed ROMs while developing the firmware for new prototype computers. This is something that Apple's developers had to do on a regular basis.
I think the poster (maybe someone’s AI experiment?) is on a tangent about replacing the standard Apple ROMs with your own versions? That wasn’t really a thing, but it wasn’t illegal either. What was illegal was copying Apple’s ROM code to sell in your own clone machines.
if you take half-a-second, longer than I spent reading that article, you would know this is a personnel account, right? do you need to repeat "AI" rumors here ? It is neither amusing nor adding any substance to the topic IMHO
This was the nightmare of Apple from the early days and they actively pursued it. Also, intelligent people in the creative professions were inventing things.