Floppy Copy Protection
If you've read enough comments and software reviews by SomeGuy, you'll notice there's often mention to copy protection especially for 1980s software titles that were on 5.25" and maybe even 8" floppy disks.
I started using computers during the transition from 5.25" to 3.5" floppy disks. 5.25" floppy disks and drivers were common place though less people were buying these new. At the time software I'd obtained was mostly from someone getting a used 386 PC and using PKZIP to create a ZIP file over multiple floppy disks to make a copy of the software to use on my own. Worked well for DOS games and apps, but not so well for Windows 3.x applications. Copying software was mainly an issue when the software came on CD, as CD burners were way too much for a 9 year old to buy and friends might still be chugging along on a 286. The trick was to hand in to Microsoft the paper form requesting the floppy drive to be mailed out.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is what exactly caused the downfall of having copy protection on the floppy disks? It seemed to be quite effective - even now to attempt for archival reasons and didn't seem to come across to software released on 3.5".
I started using computers during the transition from 5.25" to 3.5" floppy disks. 5.25" floppy disks and drivers were common place though less people were buying these new. At the time software I'd obtained was mostly from someone getting a used 386 PC and using PKZIP to create a ZIP file over multiple floppy disks to make a copy of the software to use on my own. Worked well for DOS games and apps, but not so well for Windows 3.x applications. Copying software was mainly an issue when the software came on CD, as CD burners were way too much for a 9 year old to buy and friends might still be chugging along on a 286. The trick was to hand in to Microsoft the paper form requesting the floppy drive to be mailed out.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is what exactly caused the downfall of having copy protection on the floppy disks? It seemed to be quite effective - even now to attempt for archival reasons and didn't seem to come across to software released on 3.5".
Comments
Sticking to business applications, several factors reduced the usefulness of copy protecting the floppy disks.
Most copy protection schemes require direct access to the floppy controller or specific disk sectors, OS/2 and NT don't permit that. Once many large corporations moved to the OSes of the future, standard floppy disk protection methods result in failures to install soon followed by failures to sell into these companies.
The need to copy onto hard disks and permit those hard disks to be backed up. How does one block copying while simultaneously allowing copying?
The advent of workable dongles. Copy all the disks you want. None will work unless the special circuitry is plugged in.
The rise of superior not protected competitors. People were willing to accept the copy protection on 1-2-3 when it was clearly the best spreadsheet. With something mediocre like Wordstar 2000, copy protection was just another nail in the coffin.
In my opinion probably the most important factor was that there was lots of competition back then. And I mean LOTS. If vendor A was using copy protection, then many customers would simply choose a similar non-copy protected product from vendor B. Lots of small companies got off the ground by offering non-protected, less expensive software clones.
There was also the increase in use of hard drive systems. At this point even cheap budget systems were now coming with hard disk drives. And hard drive users wanted to take full advantage of their investment, and not be hassled with flipping floppies any more.
Rather visibly at the time, there was a big push by magazine reviewers to eliminate copy protection. If your product was copy protected they very well might have given your product a thumbs down.
Compatibility was a huge issue. It was not uncommon for floppy copy protection to fail on oddball hardware. A manufacturer may have used a different floppy chip, or wired it up differently, or their BIOS may have had incompatible enhancements. Fancy systems like SCSI floppy drives (or much later USB), would also fail. Of course, the software vendor would just bitch at you for not buying a genuine 100% IBM PC compatible.
Protected-mode operating systems like OS/2 were getting more press, and under these environments direct disk access was usually forbidden. But then the vendors would again just bitch at you because they didn't support that.
Back in the day, even the big experts often thought 5.25" media would stay forever. 3.5" drives were widely considered "non-standard, non-IBM compatible", but the IBM PS/2 kicked the industry in the nuts. All of a sudden 3.5" drives were considered acceptable, and more clones popped up using them as their A: drive. There was also the feeling that even 3.5" drives might eventually be replaced by something different. The need for flexibility became more apparent to end users.
In many corporate environments, there was also a growing push to run everything off of networks. Networks enabled such advantages as centralized management and cheap locked down diskless workstations.
Of course there was the general inconvenience, that as users acquired more software, they would wind up flipping between more and more protection keydisks. For power users this probably got ridiculous. Similarly, power users might switch between applications rapidly, potentially having to flip multiple keydisks each time. This applied to both business product and games.
From a business perspective, this all leads to a serious business risk. Would you really want to make your company dependent on a piece of software that would magically stop working when the keydisk wore out? Would it still work after a machine broke down and was repaired? Would it still work when you upgraded the hardware? How much money will you lose or how far behind will your project get when your employees can't do part of their job because suddenly your software thinks you are an evil pirate? Lots of money could be involved. And if the software vendor is no longer around, then your are royally fucked. Thankfully, going back to my first point, there was much competition and businesses would happily spend money on a less risky product.
A funny one was there were an increasing number of friendly disk diagnostic tools that would helpfully "fix" your copy protected disks, rendering them unusable.
Another big issue at the time, the central point Deluxe Option Board/Transcopy and other duplicator products were showing how futile most floppy protection schemes were. Had floppy copy protection continued, we probably would have seen more similar products. And if they had been sold and used as standard floppy controllers, they could have gotten around the appearance that these devices would have only been used for "piracy".
And that is as if unprotects weren't enough. Back then, it wasn't illegal to say "change the bytes XX YY ZZ in foo.exe to 90 90 90 (no-ops)". Some magazines even published such unprotects, and you could find them on any decent bulletin board system.
Some companies not only accepted that people would "pirate" their software, but they intentionally used that as an indirect form of advertising, and then collected the real money where it counted. If one acquired an unlicensed copy of a word processor, they might learn it and get used to it and then later insist on using it in a company, where the company would be obliged to pay for it. Microsoft was really big on this for a while. You still see some of this in how they treat betas....
But don't think for one second that copy protection is dead.
Early on, software vendors such as Autodesk moved to using parallel port dongles and games moved to using document checks. These days we have product activation, products that tie themselves to your specific hardware, Digital Restrictions Management, CD-ROM copy protection, and dongles are still around. As a part of this, "Secure" Boot will happily refuse to start your device if you make any unauthorized changes.
Thanks for nice comment.
Also this text is from READ.ME of CopyWrite 1991
https://mega.nz/#!H4tijDCL!nfesfrI5-usD ... WrJ2u76Iow
There are many of Copy (Disk or Manual) Protected software list.
Secure Boot's for preventing unauthorized changes to your bootloader and keeping a chain of trust, to avoid kernel mode malware or rootkits. If you get those, game over man. So what you instead is either get signed by the entities (read; MS and VeriSign) mandated by the Windows sticker (so many major Linux distros work out of the box) or you can alternatively enroll your own keys (hell, even sign your own kernel) and even remove the stock ones. Or you can disable it, but it's a good idea to keep around.
https://books.google.com/books?id=C5n2J7iQenwC&pg=PA13
Apparently in late 1986 the military banned the purchasing of copy protected software. Reportedly with the justification so "it can easily be loaded on to a hard disk during a crisis".
Now, remember the military was a HUGE consumer of computer hardware and software, especially productivity applications. If you were a vendor selling any kind of copy protected large productivity application, you would have a hard time justifying losing the military as a client or even potential client.
Again, this certainly wasn't the only reason, but it would have added much fuel to those opposing copy protection.
Very interesting fact.
I uploaded Lotus 1-2-3 2.01 "Government Edition", I also really didin't know the reason why its version is not disk copy protected.
Lotus development removed disk copy protection only on version 2.2 of 1-2-3.
Instead installation protection was remained.