Monkey Lives?

Where did the name come from?

For testing the Macintosh, Apple wrote this thing called the Monkey. It simulated a young child: Randomly typing and clicking on things. THey would leave the monkey playing on the computer all night, and in the morning if it crashed they would know they had a problem. (Could be a memory leak or something).

Now, they didn't want the Monkey to save/delete files or quit the program being tested, so a low memory global (address 0x0100 I think) was created called MonkeyLives. This boolean told applications when the Monkey was active, so they could disable "dangerous" operations.

I heard about this from Andy Hertzfield, one of the original designers of the Apple Macintosh at a MuCOW user's group at ComputerWare in Palo Alto, in 1988 or so.

And that's what I named it after. :)

(Sometime in the last few years apple released Gorrila, the "badly behaved Monkey".)

When I put the first Intel-based (UNIX) machine on my BBS's phone line back in 1990, it was replacing a succession of Mac-based BBS programs. Being an avid Apple fan, I wanted something with a sort of mac flavor, even if it was an esoteric one. (Macs make better clients anyways :)

I found some links on MacTech about the name. In both cases, you'll have to search for "MonkeyLives" to find the information.

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