Re: Locksmith Author Unmasked?

[datajerk <datajerk@gmail.com>]

On Jul 19, 2:26 pm, CC Rider <alask...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> From the comments below the article:
>
> Mike says:
> January 11, 2011 at 11:50 pm
>
> Locksmith was written by Mark Pump who lived in the northwest suburbs
> of Chicago. The sector editor “Inspector” was written by my ex boss.
> In version 4 of Locksmith, Inspector (or was it Watson, he wrote both)
> integrated together.
>
> Mark was a funny guy. He would never admit to writing it. He and my
> boss (he wasn’t my boss yet) gave a half dozen of us a two hour
> training lesson on copy protection using Locksmith and Inspector. It
> was pretty awesome! When ever a question about the inter workings of
> Locksmith came up Mark would let my boss answer the question. He had
> so much heat on him for writing Locksmith from the publishers that he
> didn’t want to admit that he was the author.
>
> My best friend asked him early on about some special byte in Locksmith
> to prevent it from being copied. It fell on deft ears. An hour latter
> we were using Inspector to look at sectors of Locksmith it’s self and
> Mark made his only comment the night on Locksmith. He said something
> like “look, there’s some interesting set of bytes in that sector, I
> wonder what there for?”.
>
> It was that night I learned about the greatest copy protection scheme
> of them all. I believe it was by Broderbund and took a long time to
> crack (don’t even remember what game it was on). The protection was
> “Spiral Tracking”. Instead of writing on every other track or even
> (odd, even, odd, even…) tracks. Spiral Tracking was like a record, it
> kept stepping the motor in so there was only one track. You had to
> modify the drive to master one of these disks, but you could read one
> with a standard drive.
>
> Companies started to give up on copy protection after that. My company
> just put a simple copy protection on our products from then on to keep
> the honest people honest. A few years after that no copy protection at
> all.
>
> Oh, and I believe Henry Roberts created “Back It UP”.

Mark Pump talking about Locksmith on TV (1985).

http://www.archive.org/details/Software1985