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23 Years Later: the Apple II Receives Another OS Update (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Yesterday, software developer John Brooks released what is clearly a work of pure love: the first update to an operating system for the Apple II computer family since 1993. ProDOS 2.4, released on the 30th anniversary of the introduction of the Apple II GS, brings the enhanced operating system to even older Apple II systems, including the original Apple ][ and ][+. Which is pretty remarkable, considering the Apple ][ and ][+ don't even support lower-case characters. You can test-drive ProDOS 2.4 in a Web-based emulator set up by computer historian Jason Scott on the Internet Archive. The release includes Bitsy Bye, a menu-driven program launcher that allows for navigation through files on multiple floppy (or hacked USB) drives. Bitsy Bye is an example of highly efficient code: it runs in less than 1 kilobyte of RAM. There's also a boot utility that is under 400 bytes -- taking up a single block of storage on a disk. The report adds: "In addition to the Bitsy Boot boot utility, the ProDOS 2.4 'floppy' includes a collection of utilities, including a MiniBas tiny BASIC interpreter, disk imaging programs to move files from physical floppies to USB and other disk storage, file utilities, and the 'Unshrink' expander for uncompressing files archived with Shrinkit."
Not everything is about the newest and shiniest, AC.
Sometimes a nice jolt of nostalgia for a lost era in time just feels good. That's what this is for. Running a game in an emulator does not recreate the experience.
The whir and grind of the disk drive, the clacking of the keys, the authentic tones from the real sound chips... For a brief moment, one can feel like they were 8 years old again.
That is what this is about. Now, go take your soulless devotion to consumerism elsewhere.
Short answer: technically yes; probably not.
Apple had the trademark on PRODOS, but it appears to have expired according to USPTO. Even then, they could probably make a case* that using PRODOS is likely to confuse consumers. The (c) notice, however, is merely acknowledging Apple's copyright over the original version, which is still valid - if anything, that might appease their lawyers and provide evidence that the developer was acting in good faith.
* they might not actually win that case - expired TMs vs good faith use has been interpreted inconsistently by the courts - but they could certainly create enough of a ball-ache to persuade the indy dev that it wasn't worth the trouble to keep using the name.