Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> software did not have ability to phone home

This is the main reason for the simplicity of key checks.

If you copied someone elses windows installation (cd burners were very expensive, but a floppy version existed), you'd also copy the serial number, and just use that. Even if the serial verification algorithm was complicated, noone would really have to crack it at all, because they'd just use the original serial for all the copies.

Piracy was (and still is) rampant with home users, but business users still needed some kind of a simple check (so.. a simple serial) to match the installation to an actual licence, which was more "protected" than the actual medium (cd, floppy), by using holograms, microprint, etc: https://media.karousell.com/media/photos/products/2018/09/13...

> (cd burners were very expensive, but a floppy version existed)

You just borrowed the install CD. The only time you needed it was for the install and (sometimes) installing drivers after installing new hardware.

You could actually copy one of the folders from the windows CD onto your HDD and use that instead of the install CD for device drivers. From memory, you could actually complete a full install from a folder copied onto the HDD.

You can still do this with Windows 11!

I had to do this recently because of an old, well-known, but relatively rare bug with Windows installs. I created an 8GB partition at the start of the target hard disk, booted from it, and installed the OS into the rest of the disk. When the OS was up and running, I cleaned out the install partition.

Now I have an empty 8GB partition on my computer, which is a bit irritating. But I try not to think about it too much.

Yeah, first thing reinstalling a computer was a clean format, copy the CD to C:\WIN.CD\ and install from there. That way, it never asked for the Windows CD when installing drivers or functionality later -- that functionality always read where Windows was installed and only asked if it couldn't find the source. It was really worth it taking up 1/20 of a hard drive back then.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com