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While researching early magnetic storage around 1980, I've come to ponder if we know of the first piece of software on removable media that employed copy protection?

The Wikipedia article mentions that copy protection schemes became important when software started to be distributed on floppy media rather than tape - yet there's no indication of which piece of software was first to use some sort of protection, if there were some efforts on tape media already, or similar pointers on when it actually started to become a common thing.

In regards to technologies employed, the article outlines that mostly custom loading mechanisms were chosen to prevent data from being easily copied. It would be interesting to trace early efforts, how they transformed and when - for example - off-media schemes like on-paper lookup tables or code wheels were introduced.

Update: This question has already gathered very interesting insights and widened the perspective of how broad the copy protection topic actually can be once you look beyond in-software schemes. So bonus points for pointing out an actual single piece of software per storage media, like "Game X shipped on tape first and used this scheme" or "Program Y came on 8-inch floppies and did that to prevent copies."

Micropolis
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    https://medium.com/@Nalpeiron/the-history-of-dongles-copy-protection-fb24ff152c96 Getting physical Physical copy protection emerged in the early 1980s, and came in the form of a dongle. A dongle is a hardware device designed to plug into a computer’s I/O port. The dongle provides verification that the software is valid, because it ships with the product and is very difficult to duplicate. – UncleBod May 11 '22 at 14:08
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    Except many dongles could be duplicated using a bent paper clip and some modelling clay, iirc. – wizzwizz4 May 11 '22 at 14:23
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    @wizzwizz4 This escalated quite fast to dongles with embedded processors and challenge response games - like FastLOCK. But, we do not need to look for protection by hardware and/or corrupted disks. It already started before by secret protection, like games asking for a specific word from a given page/paragraph/line of the manual. After all, most would not spend the money to copy the manual - back then that would be still serious money - some games had manuals were copy shops would have charged more than the games price :)) [Worked different for people access to company copiers - don't ask] – Raffzahn May 11 '22 at 14:53
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    This question could be better answered if the range of copy protections you're interested in was specified. Even having to type in a license key at installation time counts as a kind of copy protection, whether or not it's entirely effective. I've seen VAR installations (in the 80s) where the reseller placed a physical lock on the floppy drives. Copy protection? Sure, in a way, but probably not what you're asking about. – Jim Nelson May 11 '22 at 18:15
  • You're right @jim-nelson, it's quite broad - which I didn't realize upon asking. Thus I edited the first sentence. Right now I'm unsure if we ever can put a finger on a single piece of software that had copy protection first, let's say categorized by primary storage media. Also the current answer reminded me of things like encrypted ROMs, which are interesting to collect here as well. I'm unsure if I want to narrow the scope of the question with such notable by-catch. – Micropolis May 11 '22 at 19:48
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    In CP/M times the machines had different floppy formats so they couldn't read each others disks anyway. I've seen floppy protection on Apple II disks, which I would expect was the first commercial system with critical mass for this. – Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen May 12 '22 at 06:38
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    What is really copy protection? Real old software was automatically copy protected since there was only one single machine in the whole world with that specific processor. – UncleBod May 12 '22 at 11:08
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    Do techniques employed in 80s computer games along the lines of "Please enter the eighth word on page 13 of the manual to continue" count? :) – JohannesD May 12 '22 at 18:39
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    I love this question. That is all. – Spud May 12 '22 at 19:45
  • @johannesd the original idea was to ask for "software" schemes on removable media, but I've edited the question when I realized how broad the topic is. – Micropolis May 13 '22 at 01:29
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    It might be a good idea to clarify whether you only explicitly mean protection against physical copying, or whether you would include protections that only aid in litigation to prove code came from copying a certain source. Firmwares and ROMs very early on included special 'junk' data to identify if a functionally identical chip was actually loaded with illegally copied code. Didn't prevent copying, but made proving it in court possible. – otakucode May 14 '22 at 06:40
  • @otakucode This once again proves how broad this topic is. I initially meant "physical copying", but you point out yet another interesting thing. Although I would think this is more a "fingerprinting" scheme than copy protection. I don't know how I could weave this notion into the question, but thank you for bringing it up! – Micropolis May 14 '22 at 11:21
  • @JohannesD and the manual was printed on red paper so it could not be photocopied easily. – Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen Mar 15 '23 at 18:32
  • @otakucode like in the original Macintosh - https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Stolen_From_Apple.txt – Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen Mar 15 '23 at 18:34

2 Answers2

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I couldn't say which one was the first but there were early efforts in the 1970's and 1980's

Encrypted roms

Arcade games were often hacked so ROM encryption was developed, so if the board was re-made with standard components and ROM dumps, it failed to work. Some special device decrypted the instructions on the fly between the CPU and the ROM.

For instance, you can check https://www.planetemu.net/rom/mame-roms/ckongcv which has encryption and is from 1982.

Protected tapes

Most games from the early 1980's came on tape. It took ages to load, and when you wanted to make a copy of a friend's program, you had to load, stop the program, and save the basic or/and memory to tape.

That was different for most commercial releases.

  • Some tried to prevent you from stopping the program and getting the prompt back. No prompt no easy backup. Redirecting the basic prompt to a routine that crashed the machine was a common way of doing it.
  • Some used document/manual protection already (there's the well-known ZX-spectrum lenslok system), so you could copy the tape but not the manual/wheel/whatever.
  • Some sync signals were shortened to the max so the interesting program immediately started after an intro program and it was difficult to locate it.
  • Custom tape formats were developed sometimes to speed up loading and prevent programs that used the standard way of reading the bytes from the tape to work.

Of course it was always possible to use a double tape deck to copy the tapes but it heavily depended on the quality of the tape deck (personally I never succeeded in pulling that off, plus you can't do that on the copy of the copy because of the analogue nature of the copy...)

All those tape protections were not that hard to workaround... Maybe the hardest ones were the document protections as you had to disassemble the game to understand it, and there weren't a lot of disassemblers let alone debuggers back in the day.

Final note: To provide more details, my personal experiences originate mostly from Oric Atmos where I "cracked" a lot of games with various techniques, but I also tried to crack/copy games when I briefly encountered a ZX Spectrum, without any experience besides the Oric one, and some attempts were successful, to my surprise. I called a cracked game a game which then can be copied by anyone with minimal skills (interrupt/warm reset a machine and dump to tape).

Jean-François Fabre
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16

One of the earliest would likely have been Microchess 2.0 for the Apple II, shipped on cassette in 1978. Andy McFadden's Early Copy Protection on the Apple II article has the details.

fadden
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scruss
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