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Echo Plus and
Ian Agranat
About Ian and Echo Plus Copy Program
About Ian and Echo Plus Copy Program
I had the pleasure of speaking with Ian after he reached out directly after seeing my posts with questions about the "Echo Plus Copy Program". I had searched for a copy of the manual and could not find one, so I asked Ian if he still had copies of the manual that he could get scanned. He was very helpful and provided a high-resolution scan of his original manual (from a package set that he kept from his high-school and college days).
I cleaned up the scanned images some and uploaded the software image that I had, the PDF of the manual and a picture of what was in the package when you purchased Echo Plus back in the 1980s.
Ian also wrote a quick historical reminiscing story about his foray into computers between 1978 and 1985, see below.
You can find it on the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/echo-plus-copy-program
A Little Reminiscing About Computers 1978-1985
A Little Reminiscing About Computers 1978-1985
© 2025 Ian Agranat
Thanks, Greg Jewett, for nudging me to think back 45 years to a formative period in my life!
I was always one of those loner math/science-oriented kids growing up, eager to learn about science and technology. I knew computers existed in the world, and was curious about them. In 1978 or so when I was in 8th grade, there was an after-school program with a nearby vocational technical high school. They offered a computer programming class, and I eagerly signed up to learn about computers. I took the bus there in the afternoon after school, and my dad would pick me up to take me home afterward. They had some flavor of DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) PDP-11 multi-user BASIC computer, and this is the first time I had the opportunity to learn about programming. And I loved it.
The next year I moved on to High School. They had their own PDP-11/03 computer with 4 terminals (I remember one was a VT-52 – a big heavy thing on a rolling stand with a CRT tube monochromatic character display with 80 columns and 24 lines, a couple of DEC dot-matrix printing terminals, and another off-brand CRT terminal as well). I remember it had dual 8-inch floppies for storage as well. I spent every waking hour when I wasn’t in class at one of these terminals. I had the opportunity to help protect the system from some upperclassman who figured out how to break into it – so here I had some early experience with black-hat/white-hat and cybersecurity activities back around 1980.
Ian with first Z80 computer, the predecessor of Marvin 80. (1981)
I tried to learn everything I could about how computers work. I found books in specialty bookstores about microprocessors, memories, assembly programming, logic, etc. I also learned a lot about electronics – between Heathkit and Radio Shack resources, built a HeathKit oscilloscope, and took a self-serve electronics class that I remember was a series of 45 vinyl records (those flexible kinds that came with a book) and walk through lab exercises and take self-graded quizzes.
My sophomore year, probably by 1981, I built my first functioning microcomputer from scratch. I bought a Z-80 microprocessor 40-pin DIP chip and some static RAM chips (I don’t remember how big but probably only a few K) from a local computer store and lots of other components like TTL logic gates and such from the local Radio Shack. I used just perforated boards I could stick chip sockets into on one side and solder wires to the other - a real ugly mess of wires. A panel of switches let me write instructions into RAM by setting up an address and data in binary, and a read/write strobe to write it into RAM, and then run a program. The program could blink patterns on a row of LEDs, play tones through a speaker, and react to inputs from a bank of switches.
Marvin the paranoid and depressed robot from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Later in my Junior year, I took an “electronics” class, but as the teacher noted, I already knew more than he did on the subject -- I rebuilt the computer in a more professional way with wire-wrap, a nice case and power supply, and named it the MARVIN-80 for the depressed robot in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a Z-80 based machine.
The "Marvin 80" by myself and Jon Green, class of 1983 in High School.
Print-outs taped to my college dorm wall depicting various scenes from "Auto Gyro", the game I wrote on commission for Bandinelli.
At this point, I still did not have a home computer for myself, though such devices as the Apple II and TRS-80 existed. My math/computer teacher at the High School suggested to my parents that perhaps it was about time I had a computer of my own – and they bought me my Apple II+ computer with two 5.25” floppy disks, 48K RAM plus the additional 16K expansion RAM, a dot-matrix printer.
At this point, I was more interested in writing assembly language programs (now learning the 6502 which isn’t hard after mastering the Z-80) rather than BASIC. I don’t remember the tool chain I used, but there must have been some tool for compiling assembly language into machine code.
I was never much into playing video games myself. I did enjoy the Zork adventure series, and I remember Castle Wolfenstein. But some kids in the grade or two behind me were really into video games (and this slightly younger crowd had computers as a means to play games). I thought it would be fun to create games, and wrote “Sigma 7” – a kind of stupid space-invaders like game with line-drawn 2-dimensional geometric shapes that would shrink and grow and rotate.
Some guy from Louisiana found me, I don’t remember how – he wanted to publish video games and he offered me a $500 advance plus future royalties if he could have the rights to Sigma 7 – that was a lot for a high school student in 1982! I accepted and I’m sure nothing came of it. He offered me a second $500 advance to write a video game called Auto Gyro that he conceived of – a commissioned work – so I developed that my senior year of high school into my freshman year of college. I’m sure that never went anywhere but it was a much more sophisticated graphics and sounds.
Ian in his college dorm room w/ Apple ][ computer. (1984)
My younger high school friends were interested in copying and sharing games with each other, and ideally breaking their copy protection. They didn’t have my technical skills, so they asked me if I could try. I loved the challenge of figuring out how these games were protected and how to get past them. In reverse engineering the games by examining how they bootstrapped themselves off the disk, I was basically able to boot-trace and crack games and learn about how their disk protection works. My friends also used Locksmith and Copy II Plus to try to copy games, but you had to know all these parameters specific to individual disks.
That’s when I started to figure out that disks have synch bytes and that you have to break a track at the synch bytes – and that the parameters used by the incumbent programs were basically teaching these programs how to find the beginning of the track. I figured out a way to detect synch bytes in a tight code loop that could load bytes off a track and time how long it took to load – synch bytes have extra hidden bits in them so they are actually 9 or 10 bits long, and thus take longer to load. I wrote a program to find synch bytes on tracks and copy tracks accordingly.
Echo Plus: Main Menu and Options
Echo Plus: Analyzing Format Feature
Echo Plus: Track Editor
This evolved into Echo 1.0 which I sold to my friends and started selling mail-order (probably advertising on bulletin boards and small ads in computer magazines). This was 1982 under the name “Agranat Systems” between my Junior and Senior years in High School. People would send me checks or money-orders in the mail, and I would send them a disk and manual. When I went away to college, my mom helped continue fulfilling orders and I would come home some weekends to create more disks and print more manuals.
While in college and maybe summers in between I worked on Echo Plus released 1985, a successor to Echo 1.0, and continued until college got too busy with my school work and activities (and a girlfriend). At some point I had stopped advertising and let the business wind down. It was my first foray into entrepreneurship, since I have started and sold two additional companies -- where I built the foundation for a successful career in software/firmware/systems engineering.
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