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From: brown@nicmad.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.micro.pc
Subject: Re: Lotus 1-2-3 question
Message-ID: <321@nicmad.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 17-Aug-85 20:36:42 EDT
Article-I.D.: nicmad.321
Posted: Sat Aug 17 20:36:42 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 24-Aug-85 00:19:10 EDT
References: <31300003@ISM780.UUCP> <31300005@ISM780.UUCP>
Reply-To: brown@nicmad.UUCP (Mr. Video)
Organization: Nicolet Instrument Corp. Madison WI
Lines: 28

In article <31300005@ISM780.UUCP> patrick@ISM780.UUCP writes:
>As to disassembly, and cracking the copy protection (I assume that the
>sign-on message is part of the copy protection scheme), there's not
>much I can say in a public forum; I'll restrict myself to a discussion
>of the general principles.

The 1-2-3 sign-on screen, which contains the copyright notice and to press
a key to continue, is NOT part of the copy protection scheme.  I am in the
process of looking for the subroutine that prints/looks for the key press.
It is not much fun going over code when you can't print it.  But, I will
find it sooner or later.

It does seem that even if I did tell you what three bytes to change in the
1-2-3 code, you would probably have a hard time getting your customers to
let you do it.  Also, there appear to be at least two, if not three, different
versions of 1-2-3.  So, it would make it even harder to get them to change
the code.

>So, in order to protect their own investment in software development,
>Lotus have implemented a copy-protection scheme which makes our product a
>little less useful, and hence reduces the returns on _our_ investment in
>software development.

The copy protection scheme, as I said above, has nothing to do with the
copyright notice, etc.
-- 

Mr. Video   {seismo!uwvax!|!decvax|!ihnp4}!nicmad!brown