Brands you never hear much about

Chuck Guzis wrote: Fortune Systems was something of a pioneer in the area of unbundling things previously considered to be standard parts of Unix, like the C compiler. They were explicitly building something that wasn't a Unix hacker's machine, so owners weren't expected to be rebuilding the kernel or writing software, so the C compiler didn't need to be there. So the C compiler could be a separate product, and even better it could be charged for! They also had a reasonably effective copy-protection scheme. Uninstalled Fortune software on distribution media was encrypted using a key known to Fortune and to Fortune's installation program. When you installed software from the distribution media, the software would be decrypted and then re-encrypted using a key based on the motherboard serial number for storage on the hard disk (so you couldn't just copy the executables from your system to some other system: installed software only ran on the system on which it had been installed); and of course the installer marked the distribution medium as "installed" so you couldn't just go install it again somewhere else. The end result of this, 20 years later, is that you may be able to get a Fortune 32:16, but getting it to do something interesting can be more of a challenge than it really needed to be, and when you're done you have a 68000 Unix box, maybe a little bit weirder than everyone else's. -Frank McConnell