| > But in 90s these mechanisms were in infancy. It was normal for computers to auto-login and have no password at all. Indeed, Windows 98 and earlier did not require a username/password pair by default. However, it was stupid easy to log into computers and steal stuff. Processes could read from each other's pages, but it was also stupid easy to download warez and viruses that took advantage of that. Remember, this was the age of HTTP and plain text all day every day (because computers were too slow to do client-side encryption). Antivirus reviews and comparisons were really valid, as virus databases were also in their infancy, and some companies had better data that others. > There really wasn't much possibility to protect your piece of software. If it was put on a CD somebody will either extract the key or modify your software to accept any key. Yup. Which is why Photoshop cost $600 and a non-gimped version of Office cost $400. They baked piracy into the price and had the big companies that thought nothing of these prices pay. Also, downloading cracks was a super easy way of getting viruses, doubly so if you didn't have AV running (many didn't). Doubly also, finding them was hard(er) before the days of WinMX, BitTorrent, etc. You had to know IRC and newsgroups. Not super friendly places. |