31 Mar
2010
31 Mar
'10
12:43 p.m.
On Wed, 31 Mar 2010, E. Groenenberg wrote:
That's true, but at that time they were mostly of scientific use.
Aaarggghhh! A laser and a vintage computer(part)?
There are vintage lasers.
And it would be far from the first vintage computer use of a laser.
Remember Vault Corp. "Pro-Lock"?
They created a copy-protection scheme based upon making and looking for a
physical scratch in the disk surface. As a second stage, if their
software could successfully re-write at the location of the scratch, then
it knew that the disk was bogus.
On it's own not a bad idea, as it looks.
But, Vulture Capitalists would not be attracted to a
workroom with a bunch
of workers with paperclips scratching disks. So, to make the scratch,
they used a "laser fingerprint"!
Later, they did one of the most spectacular foot shootings, ever!
They announced that "Pro-Lock 2" would retaliate against computers using
bogus copies! ("with a VIRUS!!")
Ha!, that would indeed be hitting the 'self destruct' button as a company.
As far as I know, they never sold a single copy of
"Pro-Lock 2", and EVERY
customer of "Pro-Lock 1" discontinued immediately; many with public
announcements. For years, the least informed Q&A people in magazines
would blame problems that they didn't understand on "maybe a virus, or
maybe a copy-protection program that went bad".
During my time at Oracle we did produce our own floppy distribution kits
for the European market, (the 5 1/4" ones too). In version 4 there was
a key floppy which was needed to start the DB on MSDOS. After starting,
it could be removed. Guess what, after a short period of time, some
people did find a way to duplicate the 'key' floppy so they did buy
a single set and used it in many PC's.
After that, Oracle didn't bother to add a license key mechanism to
their core software.
Just wondering, of these V4 MSDOS kits, many thousands have been sold,
and they have must been nearly everywhere.
Anybody remember them?
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com
Ed
--
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