No it's not copy protected. V 3.1 was after Lotus lost their bid on a LARGE US Government contract due to copy protection and they finally got smart and removed the protection. I have a complete package of V 3.1 that I've never installed. I looked through the docs and they say to backup the disk using "Copy a:*.*" and the tutorial doesn't tell you to insert a floppy disk when starting 123 so it doesn't use a key disk either. I have full sets of both 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 disks if you have any problems making a copy. FWIW I'm pretty sure that version 1.xx were not protected. V 2.x were protected and all versions after that were not protected. Joe At 12:52 PM 10/1/03 -0400, you wrote:

It's been a while, so I may not be remembering this correctly. What I do remember was that the copy protection was such that Lotus 123 had to be installed onto a hard drive. At install time the program would do some characterization of the hard drive (maybe the computer, too) so that at run time it could tell if it was running from the hard drive it was installed on. At install time, if a successful install, it would decrement a counter on the floppy disk (which itself had some trick tracks on it). Seems like it gave you two installs, so the counter started at 2. Now, to your question...I remember a way to hack the executable files so that the part of the code that checked to see if it was running from the hard drive it was installed on was removed. At that point you could just copy the program as if it were normal, no protection files. The part I'm not sure about is whether this was version 2 or version 3. I think I've described version 3. Hope this helps some. Gene Ehrich wrote: -- Dave Mabry dmabry(a)mich.com Dossin Museum Underwater Research Team