Great Hierophant wrote:
The are two difficult problems to easy disk backup and transfer. The first is copy protection. It was designed to make copying difficult, if not impossible. To effectively back-up a program, you have to essentially eliminate the copy protection without also making the program non-fucntional. Next is a related problem. Many programs use
Luckily, this has already been done for most of the classics. Sites like Asimov have a huge library of old Apple II games that have been cracked, thus preserving them forever. Unfortunately, there will always be less popular games that were missed and are still out there, uncracked, deteriorating. Lots of educational programs have this problem, as they weren't that popular outside of schools.
Unfortunately, most folks with older software in their posession don't have the necessary skills to crack the copy protection, so we may end up losing some of it forever.
This, by the way, is why I get so annoyed when folks whine about Asimov and piracy; I think letting this software languish and become lost to history is a much greater crime than pirating software that is no longer commercially viable and not distributed by its authors.
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