[coldcode]

It was a great game.

I also remember making gold master floppies for our products going back to 1987. It's actually a scary process because if you made any mistakes, you got back thousands-millions (depending on who you were) worthless disks back. Even sending out updates cost money and often we had to charge people in order to pay for duplication, packaging, shipping and sometimes a manual update. Often updates were the entire package of N disks; if lucky you can manage a patch disk.

Thinking back now I think there were still dinosaurs on the earth at the time too.

[Ma8ee]

I got a bit nervous when someone found out that the computer we used to burn our master CDs on where infected with a virus. Luckily all disks were clean.

[joezydeco]

It could have been worse. I know of one studio that sent a debug version to the duplication factory by accident. It killed the company.

[dylan604]

Did the company not have insurance?

[bch]

Now I’m curious: what kinds of insurance would such a company have?

[mjevans]

I think I've heard of this in relation to housing contracts on TV (back when I watched stuff like Holmes on Homes).

Errors and Omissions insurance?

[dylan604]

If you have the money for the premium, you can get just about any kind of coverage you want. There are coverage types that protect a company from an honest mistake ruining the company. While the payout may not be able to keep the company intact, it could at least keep from total collapse. Insurance to protect if you get sued for mistakes. These are not the types of things you worry about as an employee of bigCorp, but in a start up, you learn about these things quickly if you find good business advisors.

[hinkley]

The thing I always screwed up when copying was getting the disks backward and having to start over. Did you do anything special to reduce human error, like special stickers or colored disks?

For instance nobody in the office is allowed to use red floppies except for master disks.

[e12e]

Master disks didn't have write protection on?

[derefr]

I think that would be less about overwriting a master, and more about confusing some other disk for the master and sending it to the copier instead.

[fit2rule]

I really miss the days when all I had to do, to finish a release, was wait for 'dd' to complete, and then I was done.

Floppy-based releases were amazing. You knew exactly what was going to boot.