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Comment by accrual | Hacker News Reader

Kind of a tangent but I wonder how the serial numbers on the floppy disks were generated. They're clearly not sequential and the length differs between version 2.0D and 2.0F.

    SER# 312929011101963 (15 digits)
    SER# 3129289101202698 (16 digits)

I wonder if they kept track of these in a CSV or something. Was the idea a customer could call in with their serial number and report a problem, which could be traced to a batch number or something? Anyway, just a curiosity I noticed.

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I think you just nerdsniped me:

312929011101963 2.0D TFA

312929011100925 2.0D [1]

312928072902102 2.0D [2]

312928091704272 2.0D 5.25" [3]

3129289101202698 2.0F TFA

312922022211663 2.0F [4]

752923060122148 2.0F [5]

272929011600468 2.0F [6]

272929052600081 2.0F [7]

The 16 digits seems like a freak.

[1] https://archive.org/details/space-quest-ii-ms-dos-disk-1-of-...

[2] https://www.mocagh.org/loadpage.php?getgame=sierra3pack-alt

[3] https://www.sierrachest.com/gfx/games/SQ2/box/03_m1.jpg

[4] https://www.mobygames.com/game/128/space-quest-ii-chapter-ii...

[5] https://ia802300.us.archive.org/12/items/spacequest_ii_kfx/s...

[6] https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/space-quest-ii-seirra...

[7] https://www.tradera.com/item/340851/630607300/space-quest-ii...

I was also wondering about these numbers when putting the article together. The photo of the 2.0D disk is of my own personal copy of the game. I assume the number is unique to that disk, but I haven't spent any time at all researching that. I wonder if someone has.

They might have intentionally obfuscated it, maybe to conceal how many disks they produced (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem ).

Just XOR'ing the real serial number with a secret key that has exactly as many bits as the (padded) serial number is entirely sufficient, though my experience tells me that at that time, folks tended to do more complicated (and ironically, much less secure, not that it matters much here) things. Basic cryptography literacy wasn't as common then, as unencrypted and unauthenticated communication was the norm, even on most networks.

> as unencrypted and unauthenticated communication was the norm, even on most networks

That it worked at all was pretty amazing :)

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