You guys know, it just dawned on me that beyond the practicalities of the question, we're looking at something incredibly significant here. That is, if this story is in fact genuine and not just a fictious commentary on subscription models.
So first of all... a software activation model from the '80s? Twenty years before Microsoft "invented" it? Back when even ARPANet was only a curiosity? That's something incredibly awesome. Key disks, manual code entry, and serial or parallel hardware keys were a thing - remote activation, now that's something else entirely.
It's like finding an ancient Egyptian D&D-like rulebook and twenty sided dice dating from the age of pharaoh Ramses. Not "impossible" as such, just extremely remarkable and improbable.
Then, the other wonder here is not that the activation server stopped, it's that it stopped in twenty-effing-seventeen. I'd have expected that BBS to have been scrapped around '95 at the latest. Also, phone numbers - where I grew up, phone number formats and area codes have changed three times since the '80s, a BBS call coded in the '80s would have stopped working before '91.
Also, I cannot imagine the change-averseness of someone who keeps using a CAD suite from the '80s (probably on some ancient XT or DEC or something weird and irreplacable) well into the 2010s. I mean my dad is the image of conservativeness, and yet even he migrated all his CAD work from the old DOS tools over to Windows-based, modern stuff when Windows NT 4.0 came out...
I'm not saying "it's not true", just that if it is, this should probably be on some Youtube computing history show as the curiosity of the year.
> It's like finding an ancient Egyptian D&D-like rulebook and twenty sided dice dating from the age of pharaoh Ramses. Not "impossible" as such, just extremely remarkable and improbable.
D20: Rome. Close, but not that close. (Found in Egypt though)
Yes, originally bought in the 80s, but like a lot of one-man-band hobbyist software, could well have had a "lifetime upgrades" option that at some point introduced the DRM.
You guys know, it just dawned on me that beyond the practicalities of the question, we're looking at something incredibly significant here. That is, if this story is in fact genuine and not just a fictious commentary on subscription models.
So first of all... a software activation model from the '80s? Twenty years before Microsoft "invented" it? Back when even ARPANet was only a curiosity? That's something incredibly awesome. Key disks, manual code entry, and serial or parallel hardware keys were a thing - remote activation, now that's something else entirely.
It's like finding an ancient Egyptian D&D-like rulebook and twenty sided dice dating from the age of pharaoh Ramses. Not "impossible" as such, just extremely remarkable and improbable.
Then, the other wonder here is not that the activation server stopped, it's that it stopped in twenty-effing-seventeen. I'd have expected that BBS to have been scrapped around '95 at the latest. Also, phone numbers - where I grew up, phone number formats and area codes have changed three times since the '80s, a BBS call coded in the '80s would have stopped working before '91.
Also, I cannot imagine the change-averseness of someone who keeps using a CAD suite from the '80s (probably on some ancient XT or DEC or something weird and irreplacable) well into the 2010s. I mean my dad is the image of conservativeness, and yet even he migrated all his CAD work from the old DOS tools over to Windows-based, modern stuff when Windows NT 4.0 came out...
I'm not saying "it's not true", just that if it is, this should probably be on some Youtube computing history show as the curiosity of the year.