In the 2020s we’re used to software being readily accessible, and often free, whether as-in-beer or as-in-speech. This situation is a surprisingly new one, and in an earlier era of consumer software it was most often an expensive purchase. An anti-piracy industry sprang up as manufacturers tried to protect their products, and it’s one of those companies that [GloriousCow] examines in detail, following their trajectory from an initial success through to an ignominious failure driven by an anti-piracy tech too extreme even for the software industry.
Vault Corporation made a splash in the marketplace with Prolok, a copy protection system for floppies that worked by creating a physically damaged area of the disc which wouldn’t be present on a regular floppy. The write-up goes into detail about the workings of the system, including how to circumvent a Prolok protected title if you find one. This last procedure resulted in a lawsuit between Prolok and Quaid Software, one of the developers of circumvention tools, which established the right of Americans to make backup copies of their owned software.
The downfall of Vault Corporation came with their disastrously misjudged Prolok Plus product, which promised to implant a worm on the hard disks of pirates and delete all their files in an act of punishment. Sensing the huge reputational damage of being tied to such a product the customers stayed away, and the company drifted into obscurity.
For those interested further in the world of copy protection from this era, we’ve previously covered the similar deep dives that [GloriousCow] has done on Softguard’s Superlok as well as the Interlock system from Electronic Arts.
Ashton-Tate, oh yeah that heavy handed garbage disposal that everyone talks about today because they provided lots of value for money
In HS we had T shirts printed ‘piratae em quickum’.
I hated latin, even thought the teacher gifted me a C and recognized me as the anti-Christ.
Had an in at Electronic arts (of the day).
Would often get pirate games 2 months before release.
Good times. Before sprite games got boring.
Think you have an original idea for a sprite game?
IIRC there were about 40,000 ‘commercial’ (intent to make money) games for the C-64.
They did everything, three times. Was kind of cool. Like shooters now.
Mostly derivative BS, but still.
If you wanted a sprite game where the character was a penis walking on the boys, chasing a winking giner, shooting giant single sprems at attacking herpies viri?
It was available, but was a silly reskin.
I digress. Harvest season.
Well, in the really old days when “mini”-computers were the size of a large suitcase, software was often free since the cost of the hardware was so high. There’s a fair amount of software available for the DEC PDP-8 for example, which is fun. Haven’t been able to track down the PDP-8 ALGOL compiler, though.
Does https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/ALGOL/source not have what you’re looking for?
Wow, thanks for that link.
Hah, no problem!