[anyfoo]

Was ist ever confirmed that it was in fact a laser? I wanted to make a trivia question out of this ProLok protection, because “lasers for copy protection” sounds just weird enough to potentially be a nonsense answer without context, but I couldn’t confirm that the holes were indeed made with lasers, and not with other means.

[antonvs]

Good question. I don't know the answer, but I'm quite certain that it didn't really matter what mechanism was used to mark a diskette. Any damage would be equally strong as a way to detect copying.

[anyfoo]

Yeah, it matters only in “interestingness” or “coolness”.

[Someone]

Their patent (https://patents.google.com/patent/US4785361A/en) doesn’t mention a laser, but of course that doesn’t imply it wasn’t a laser.

I would guess (more or less) identically damaging multiple floppy disks in the same way would be easier with a laser than with something mechanical (e.g. a knife or a drill) (it is fairly easy to control power and duration of a burn), so it might well have been a laser.

On the other hand, disk tracks weren’t exactly tiny at that time in history.

[anyfoo]

It could be a tiny drop of something corrosive, but with that I’m also still wondering if a laser isn’t simpler, yeah.

I have almost no doubt that it could be a laser, it’s just unfortunate (and maybe a little bit suspicious) that I haven’t found it confirmed anyway. Almost like they wanted it to be a laser (hence the folklore around it), but had to use a less cool method to do it. But of course it might as well just have been a laser, and they for some reason declined to market or even just document it that way, for whatever reason.