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To: RightWhale
Anti-copying technology tends to have a short lifespan and unexpected side-effects.

I once was an afficianado of the steam-driven Commodore 64 computer. At some point some of the software publishers (the C64 used those old five and half inch very floppy floppy disks) tried to make their stuff copy-proof by drilling tiny holes in their floppies in sectors that the software never referenced but which most standard wall-to-wall copying programs would read while making copies; trying to read the sector with a hole in it would cause the disk drive to blow a fuse. This backfired mightily: It was VERY common among users that, when software became obsolete for some reason (such as a revised edition), the disk of the old version would be re-used for storage, so trying to recycle these perforated disks in a perfectly legitimate way destroyed disk drives.

Oh, and the use of holes to prevent copying (and some other tricks, such as requiring a special "dongle" to be plugged into one of the C64's sockets to generate a particular register value without which the software wouldn't run), was eventually circumvented by more innovative copying techniques that simply duplicated what was loaded inside the computer's memory instead of on the disk.

9 posted on 01/06/2004 10:10:43 AM PST by DonQ
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To: DonQ
I still have a couple VIC-20s around, and a couple disc drives. I haven't fired them up in a while.
I also have here, at hand, a pile of 8" floppies. There is a circle of holes in an uneven pattern like what you mentioned in each one. It was semi-annoying that they would work in a Tektronix, but not an IBM, and often enough not in any drive but the one they were written in.
That you can pop a floppy into just about any computer these days and find it readable is close to a miracle to me.
12 posted on 01/06/2004 10:21:28 AM PST by RightWhale (Repeal the Law of the Excluded Middle)
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