CC Rider

Full article here (Robert X. Cringely):
http://www.cringely.com/2011/01/veri...ack-and-white/

Steve Wozniak invented the Apple ][ disk drive with its Integrated Woz
Machine (IWM) controller, which was revolutionary for its time. And
unlike competing disk drives (these were floppies, by the way — hard
drives and optical drives had yet to make it to PCs) the Apple drives
had copy protection built-in. That is until Woz decided to defeat his
own design by inventing the first nibble copier so he could copy his
VisiCalc disks.

Competing floppies of the time used hard sectors determined by little
holes punched in the disk. Copying those floppies was easy because it
was simple to see where the sectors were. But the IWM ignored hard
sectors completely, using its own sectoring scheme that could be
varied by a command embedded on the disk and read by the IWM firmware.
This copy protection was finally defeated by the nibble copier, which
also ignored sectors and simply made perfect copies of an entire disk,
one little nibble (half-byte) at a time.

Having invented the nibble copier, which was sold under the name
Locksmith, Woz then went on to defeat it, again undermining his own
design. His motivation in this case was two-fold: 1) to have fun, and;
2) to keep Locksmith disks, themselves, from being copied. He did this
by embedding a sequence on the Locksmith disks that effectively said,
“do not copy this disk.” It helps when you control both the software
and the hardware upon which it runs, eh?

Eventually Woz and Henry Roberts developed a further copy protection
scheme that hid the sector information in a pseudo-random number. That
was about 30 years ago and last we heard Woz was trying to defeat
himself again by using heat from a laundry iron to essentially push
bits from one floppy through to another, again making a perfect copy.

Here is where we return to the present. Andy Hertzfeld, who told me
this story, predicted that Woz would never be able to copy a floppy
using an iron. But Woz has yet to capitulate on this, claiming that —
30 years later — he is still trying.

CC Rider

From the comments below the article:

Mike says:
January 11, 2011 at 11:50 pm

Locksmith was written by Mark Pump who lived in the northwest suburbs
of Chicago. The sector editor “Inspector” was written by my ex boss.
In version 4 of Locksmith, Inspector (or was it Watson, he wrote both)
integrated together.

Mark was a funny guy. He would never admit to writing it. He and my
boss (he wasn’t my boss yet) gave a half dozen of us a two hour
training lesson on copy protection using Locksmith and Inspector. It
was pretty awesome! When ever a question about the inter workings of
Locksmith came up Mark would let my boss answer the question. He had
so much heat on him for writing Locksmith from the publishers that he
didn’t want to admit that he was the author.

My best friend asked him early on about some special byte in Locksmith
to prevent it from being copied. It fell on deft ears. An hour latter
we were using Inspector to look at sectors of Locksmith it’s self and
Mark made his only comment the night on Locksmith. He said something
like “look, there’s some interesting set of bytes in that sector, I
wonder what there for?”.

It was that night I learned about the greatest copy protection scheme
of them all. I believe it was by Broderbund and took a long time to
crack (don’t even remember what game it was on). The protection was
“Spiral Tracking”. Instead of writing on every other track or even
(odd, even, odd, even…) tracks. Spiral Tracking was like a record, it
kept stepping the motor in so there was only one track. You had to
modify the drive to master one of these disks, but you could read one
with a standard drive.

Companies started to give up on copy protection after that. My company
just put a simple copy protection on our products from then on to keep
the honest people honest. A few years after that no copy protection at
all.

Oh, and I believe Henry Roberts created “Back It UP”.

Toinet

You know what? Thank you!
Antoine

datajerk

On Jul 19, 2:26*pm, CC Rider <alask...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> From the comments below the article:
>
> Mike says:
> January 11, 2011 at 11:50 pm
>
> Locksmith was written by Mark Pump who lived in the northwest suburbs
> of Chicago. The sector editor “Inspector” was written by my ex boss.
> In version 4 of Locksmith, Inspector (or was it Watson, he wrote both)
> integrated together.
>
> Mark was a funny guy. He would never admit to writing it. He and my
> boss (he wasn’t my boss yet) gave a half dozen of us a two hour
> training lesson on copy protection using Locksmith and Inspector. It
> was pretty awesome! When ever a question about the inter workings of
> Locksmith came up Mark would let my boss answer the question. He had
> so much heat on him for writing Locksmith from the publishers that he
> didn’t want to admit that he was the author.
>
> My best friend asked him early on about some special byte in Locksmith
> to prevent it from being copied. It fell on deft ears. An hour latter
> we were using Inspector to look at sectors of Locksmith it’s self and
> Mark made his only comment the night on Locksmith. He said something
> like “look, there’s some interesting set of bytes in that sector, I
> wonder what there for?”.
>
> It was that night I learned about the greatest copy protection scheme
> of them all. I believe it was by Broderbund and took a long time to
> crack (don’t even remember what game it was on). The protection was
> “Spiral Tracking”. Instead of writing on every other track or even
> (odd, even, odd, even…) tracks. Spiral Tracking was like a record, it
> kept stepping the motor in so there was only one track. You had to
> modify the drive to master one of these disks, but you could read one
> with a standard drive.
>
> Companies started to give up on copy protection after that. My company
> just put a simple copy protection on our products from then on to keep
> the honest people honest. A few years after that no copy protection at
> all.
>
> Oh, and I believe Henry Roberts created “Back It UP”.

Mark Pump talking about Locksmith on TV (1985).

http://www.archive.org/details/Software1985