| From: | John Marchant |
| Date: | 18 Aug 2000 at 02:14:55 |
| Subject: | Re: Amiga Piracy |
Hi Bart. In a message on 17-Aug-00 09:54:36, you wrote:
>I can't see entering a serial code into the installation program being
>a "complete pain". 15 seconds to type in 16 numbers?
Back around 1980 I was with a small company writing business
software for early Commodore machines. We wrote in Basic and there
was no compiler. Embedded in the main program was the customer's
name encoded, with a copy in another file differently encoded, and
this was displayed on the intro screen. The program measured its
own length, and if the name or length was changed it refused to
run. (We often caught ourselves out while testing!) The decoding
was done with a short machine-code subroutine.
We did read of a "poke" command which would cause the cpu to loop,
overheat, and die with smoke: but we decided that wrecking the
customer's computer would probably lead to heavy legal costs.
John
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