> I must say, this copy protection mechanism seems a bit… simplistic? A hardware dongle that just passes back a constant number?

Seems like it was an appropriate amount of engineering. Looks like this took between an afternoon and a week with the help of an emulator and decompiler. Imagine trying to do this back then without those tools.

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15155 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Audience matters. Something intended to stop legitimate business consumers in a non tech industry requires substantially less sophistication than something built to withstand professional reverse engineers.

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dwattttt 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Locks are there to keep honest people honest.

To expand on the saying, they're not there to be insurmountable. Just to be hard enough to make it easier to do things the right way.

	▲	nkrisc 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And often they’re there so no one can plausibly say they didn’t know what they were doing or stumbled into it accidentally. You can’t “accidentally” go through a door with a padlock on it. I’d guess it’s something similar with this dongle. You can’t “accidentally” run the software without the dongle.

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Gigachad 29 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

These days there would be an Aliexpress listing selling fake dongles within a month making it easy for the business customers too.

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classichasclass 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Copy protection was also generally less robust for educational software, since it sold to generally law-abiding folks (parents, educators, etc.). Never saw Rapidlok or V-MAX! used for educational software on the Commodore 64, for example.

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bri3d 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In fairness, the decompiler didn't work on the protection method :)

I think that both halves of the author's thesis are true: I bet that you could use this device in a more complicated way, but I also bet that the authors of the program deemed this sufficient. I've reversed a lot of software (both professionally and not) from that era and I'd say at least 90% of it really is "that easy," so there's nothing you're missing!

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opinologo 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Iremember doing exactly this kind of hack for a small telco in Bueno Aires. Extel. Around the year 2000.

In most cases it was not much more difficult than what OP described.

	▲	iamflimflam1 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I worked on some software that was used by telcos around that time - you were probably hacking our dongles :)

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cyanydeez 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, my IT company bitshifts suspect files and provides the magic number.

The protection just needs suficirntly complex.