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Comment by webtechgal | Hacker News Reader

Wasn't there some method where a (physical) hole was made somewhere (presumably in an unused track/sector) in the floppy so that the original floppy would work, but disk-to-disk copy operation would fail?

Then, at some point in time came along those (parallel port pass-through) dongles - I think they used to be called HASP (HArdware for Software Protection).

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HASP still exists, it's a USB key now:

https://sentinel.gemalto.com/software-monetization/sentinel-...

Ah, so USB is what it is at now! I think one of the first movers in the HASP sector was an Israeli company, called Alladin Technologies or something - don't know if they're still around.

Used HASP dongles as late as 2012 for some realtime camera software. Alladin seems familiar too but I cannot say for sure if it was that or another.

Suffice to say: for being Digital Restrictions Managements tools they worked amazingly well, we had far more issues with activating Windows downgrade licenses and least but not last individual RHEL licenses :-/

Yes, it was. I remember both the names Alladin and HASP from old computer mag ads (e.g. BYTE, PC Magazine).

Alladin makes usb tokens to store A3 certificates

Throwaway to answer but: I remember that the "5 1/4" floppy disk of the game "Lemmings" had a hole somewhere that was blocking the regular copy programs (like diskcopy).

Exactly. Some Financial Accounting packages selling here in India back then used that trick.

My former boss (in IT since 1983, from whom I got initiated to hacking) wrote a disk copy program that would copy the source disk sector to sector, ignoring any error along the way, that dealt with the hole in short order. (He used it to make backup copies for legit users, and not for piracy.)

Wasn't there a dongle for an old computer like a spectrum or Dragon32 that you could emulate by waggling your joystick whilst the game loaded?

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