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From: BillW50 on 27 Jul 2010 11:41
BillW50 wrote on Tue, 27 Jul 2010 09:11:40 -0500:

[snip]

>> "I only had two major problems with floppies in all of the years I
>> used
>> them. One was most floppies could be booted between 300 to 400 times.
>> After that they were trash. Pain in the butt with copy protected boot
>> floppies. As you had to go out and buy another one. What a scam! "
>>
>> What kind of "engineer" would not know how to copy a protected floppy?
>> One who invented the CD?

[snip]

> And as for cracking the copy protection of Berkeley Softworks, they used
> extended tracks and changed the sync timing. So copy software was
> totally useless. Yes the code to check for the copy protection could be
> hacked out. But when Berkeley Softworks released GEOS v1.3 of their new
> desktop, they also included AFAIK one of the first trojans. As it would
> check if the copy protection was removed. And if it was, it would in a
> month or two delete all of the boot files. Nice eh?

I got curious about whatever happened to GEOS (aka Berkeley Softworks).
And I found out it later ended up with CMD and later still with Click
Here Software. You can download the boot disks from the following:

http://cbmfiles.com/geos/geos-13.php

And at the time, it was the second most popular GUI OS just behind the
Mac. Not something you hear a lot and I bet most people never even heard
of GEOS. And today you can run GEOS under almost any OS with an emulator
called VICE.

http://www.viceteam.org/

And you can read more about Berkeley Softworks heavy copy protection
here. And start reading under the heading of "What Went Wrong With GEOS".

http://www.commodore.ca/history/company/turks_geos.htm

And for me it has been very nostalgic running GEOS 128 once again. And I
forgot that there was no scroll bars. Yet it was still very functional.
As all you did was to move the mouse at the bottom of the screen to
scroll down, or the top to scroll up. And the trash could only hold one
file. So you could only undo the last one. And it had that nice
uncluttered look to it. Awww... what a nice time to be using computers
back then. Too bad it isn't very functional anymore by today's
standards. But still fun to play with after all of these years. ;-)

--
Bill
Asus EEE PC 702G4 ~ 2GB RAM ~ 16GB-SDHC
Xandros Linux (build 2007-10-19 13:03)
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