Years ago, we had an expensive copy of "Soft ICE" for windows. It was an in-circuit-emulator that let you break in to system routines and such; very handy for debugging our sound card drivers. the problem was that the dongle it came with was interfering with our hardware we were trying to debug, so pretty early on, one of the other developers stepped through the Soft Ice software using itself, found the routines that checked for the dongle, and patched out the check. :D
Don't let the scrubbed numbers stop you Dave! Ben from Applied Science would have dissolved the epoxy and looked at the die. That said AvE would hit it with a hammer.
Actually there is a channel on here that all it does is decap ICs and analyse them. "Electronupdate". For 74 series you don't need to decap them, you can just LA them. Or stick them into one of those $50 machines from China that automatically figure out what standard IC it is, they can identify thousands of standard types.
@@xxM5xx logic analyser. You know from the layout where the inputs and outputs are, you vary the inputs and see what the outputs are doing, you'll figure out every 74 series with a little bit of effort.
I used to make these back in the 80’s to protect a video library software package I was selling. It was just a single CD4031 64bit shift register which I sent a stream of 2048 random bits to and watched to see that they came out again after a delay. Simple but effective back in those days. Yes I did wipe the markings off the chip!
Did anyone even bother reverse-engineering the dongles themselves? Surely it's easier to just patch out the check in the software than to mess around with hardware... Even more sophisticated protection that decrypts it's own code using the dongle, you ought to be able to capture the decrypted code in memory.
@@KarlBaron Back then they'd put multiple checks all over the software and obfuscate the checks using math and bit shifts so there were no absolute addresses (and certainly not BIOS calls) to search for. Some checks didn't happen every time -- maybe every hundredth or thousandth pass through a code. That was to give you the confidence to use the software for awhile before it shut down. Some software was especially nasty by returning incorrect results or creating file corruption (even the executable on disk!) if the dongle wasn't there. You were always taking the risk that there was still one check that wasn't removed that would destroy hours or days of work.
A company I worked for as a service engineer bought some crappy data-capture software with dongles. It was only when they moved to machines with no parallel ports that we found out there wasn't anything inside the dongles except wires. I was full of admiration for the software company to be honest :-)
I see it relatively often in the audiovisual industry, Steinberg’s Nuendo Live requires a dongle to authorise, LSC has used permanent dongles in their lighting consoles, and malighting uses a similar concept with their "free software"
@@timothystevenson7907 Unless things have changed, Pro Tools uses dongles too, or at the very least requires compatible audio interface hardware to be used
As bad as the dongle is it's still better and more secure from an end user standpoint than always online DRM. Online drm the company servers get hacked you can assume your systems got hacked as well they go under the software stops working unless you patch it. Plus some stuff like SCADA systems you are asking for trouble like wannacry if you connect them to the internet.
I have a piece of software on an old Mac called "NuCLear Mac" for controlling radiological sample cameras. It uses a National Instruments DAQ PCI card as its dongle, although it appears the thing is straight from NI with no modifications...
I made copies of dongles. Those usually contained a PIC microcontroller which was trivial to dump the memory from. You just etch a new board, populate it, flash it and off you go. Some sophisticated dongles had their own microprocessor, RAM, ROM, some even had a RTC. There you just copy the ROM and the parts would be off the shelf. The most clever one was using a 255 bytes EPROM that would get a challenge code and send a reply code. They used the EPROM as the controller and giant logic gate. When I opened one I was thinking "how on earth was it doing it with a single EPROM? That chip has to be special". Nope, just your standard chip, clever
Oh, I remember those, and the joy when you had to use two or even three of those for various bits of CAD software; they only worked when stacked in the right order, and you couldn't push your PC all the way back to the wall. There were even parallel port ISA cards that had the connector on the inside (of the PC) so you could lock your valuable dongles inside the case.
Takes me back to the days that we had a program called FastBack that would insist you insert the original disk in the floppy drive before you started backing up your computer to other floppy disks. It took me a single afternoon to step through the program with DEBUG in MS-DOS and just jumping into and over CALL instructions until I found the subroutine that checked for the original floppy. I wrote a batch file that executed the DEBUG instructions from the command line and from then on we could leave the original disk out... I didn't even have to patch the program.
In the Land Survey business (at least here in the USA), certain programs needed a dongle to work past the demo version. We had TerraModel as our CAD (runs rings around AutoCAD for land work) from 1995 to at least 2009 when I left that company, and it was a Sentinel model from Rainbow Technologies, at least 3 of the parallel port units, and when we upgraded, we had to switch to the USB versions. Currently (in my new job- well 6th year. lol) i have a USB Sentinel key for the Foresight DXM Survey Software, which is used for the really old Data Collector. I really only use it for file conversion, but at least it still works. So, yeah, there are still some in use out there.
many audio software packs and plugin packs had dongles through the early 2000s. Random things that didn't catch up to download-platforms and subscription services. Digidesign (Now Avid) Pro-Tools is a notable one.
I hated Digidesign for their dongles, since I got a PCI controller and a matching 8ch IO rack module for cheap a long time ago, but was never able to use it. I thought a PCI card could pretty much function as a license for software, since who is using the software without the Digidesign hardware? But I am not from this field, I just want to build a 5.1 microphone array back than
I used to be an automotive tech, and had AllData (repair manuals on cd) they would send new disks every 3 months, but you had to pay a subscription to the service and it had one of these. you never had to change the dongle but the disks would not work without the dongle. the disks would quit working just after 3 months, (they would not send the new ones if you did not pay).
Around the mid 90s, a customer of ours, used some pricey manufacturing management software which came with one of these Rainbow brand dongles. The owner wanted to run two copies. One at the office and one at home. He let me borrow the dongle. I hooked it up to my PC and put a logic analyzer on it. Found that only one data pin was used to send a serial data stream. But always the same data sequence. I made a bootleg dongle copy, in about an hour, which worked just fine. I don't now how many versions of these security dongles Rainbow made, but due to how quickly I defeated it, I was not impressed. I'm not the "lock picking lawyer". Just some old goober, the state of California gave an engineering degree. Its from California, so take it for what its worth.
The local youth center I volunteered at had a computer with proprietary music playing software on it and a parallel port dongle in the early 2000s. Each month we'd receive an update cd with new music. During a LAN party I hooked up that pc to the network, pulled all the files and software to my pc. Music files appeared to be an encrypted form of MP3, but the best bit was the software only checked for the dongle once on startup. So I switched the dongle to my pc, booted the software, put the dongle back where it belonged and then ripped a lot of music by digitally recording it through my SoundBlaster Live! 1024 card. Of course this was back in the day when a lot of games and movies were still exchanged on LAN parties or on CD-Rs. Good times :)
@@volvo09 Yeah that was a proper score, high quality but also taking into consideration how long it would have taken to download that many songs over a 1 Mbps internet connection vs 100 Mbps LAN.
@@phil2156 I'm not sure actually if that soundcard recorded its analog output or if it captured its output before the dac, if I remember correctly it was the latter, courtesy of the awesome EMU10K1 chip. Either way it was very convenient and better quality than messing with a jack-jack cable :)
I used to work for Data Encryption Systems when they were based at the bosses house about a mile outside Cannington in Somerset. This was back in the early nineties, and since then the company moved to Taunton and, according to a quick google search, is still selling dongles today, even adopting the USB C standard...
Parallel port had one wonderful thing - IT JUST WORKED. You connect the cable, write to a register and boom, data bounces to your external device. No DTE/DCE, secret handshakes, parity bits, random pinouts and so on being the typical joy of serial communication.
I have several of these things here, just can't bring myself to throw them out! Two that are badged Rainbow Sentinel are for Lattice Semiconductor, another larger one for COCAD and two that are unknown. I remember also i think it was Cubase on the Atari ST used a dongle in the cartridge port.
I still have a few of the USB dongles from the 2000s, which were still in use at least up through 2005, along with their matching counterparts in parallel form - would you be at all interested in those? They were for old point-of-sale terminals, and have 1-4 lane licenses on them for Microsoft CRM (Customer Resource Management) - all older versions, of course, but I think across 3 generations of the software? Perhaps useful to do a comparison between them? Or just teardown the USB ones? If you're interested, I'd be more than glad to send them to you.
I used a altera max programming development environment back in the early 90s which probably used the same dongle. But I cracked it by tracing the disassembled startup code on the the computer which was recognizably compiled C or something and i found that I intermittently called a function which would check the dongle and then return one or zero and if zero it would bomb out an complain you needed a dongle. So I just changed one single byte in the code so that the return value was always one, and that worked, because while it frequently call this to check the dongle was plugged in, after my change it always returned true.
I was still using a parallel port dongle in 2007. It was a software for controlling an engraver we used at work. I managed to install the software and the dreaded dongle on a windows server and use multiple TSE sessions successfully though. The license stated it was for a single computer. Didn't say anything about multiple sessions. I believe this setup is still in use to this day!
Until last year, my school had a classroom full of windows xp computers that had one of these dongles plugged into the parallel port of every computer. Didn't know these were this old
While the Rainbow name may be gone, they probably merged with Sentinel and eAladdin, so now owned by Thales/Gemalto. In general, software companies would license a proprietary library to talk to the dongle and some dongle-protected software to configure both the protection in the software and the dongles sent to each customer. The protection tools could encrypt part of the program so you couldn't even read the application code without a valid dongle. Further details may still be under NDA.
Secure Computing was one of this companies names during the middle of it's life. I've got a Rainbow dongle protected release of Newtek's Lightwave 3D 5.5 for Windows NT 4 on DEC Alpha.
In 1990 when I was an apprentice I worked in the engineering department. One engineer was using this Quartus Software on a 386DX-16. They bought this software but some colleagues reverse engineered this dongle and replaced the logic with: One ALTERA EPLD :) So they used a Dolch Logic Analyzer and the Altera software to hack this, it was awesome. Unfortunately I don not have no contact to any of them anymore.
As a kid I have build some "dongles" for me and good friends in the 90's. It was a simple inverter in the data read and write lines to an external floppy drive. Other drives can't read these disks, of course ;-).
@@novafawks Thanks. Here's a blatant plug. I haven't really done much with my YT channel so far, but I'm finally planning to start making more serious videos about Gameboy technology, programming and music this year. If you want, feel free to subscribe. If you use LSDj I have a feeling you might like the upcoming videos.
I can remember as a kid I played with this idea. Took a dip header and put some resistors across the pins and had the software look for the specific range. The dip header plugged into the internal game control dip socket on the motherboard.
We still use (USB) dongles for our Mentor board design & analysis tools. It's much cheaper than buying the floating network licenses yet still allows users to share the license.
My first digital electronics consulting job, back in 1983, was to design a dongle (serial port, I think). All it did was oscillate, so that it could be sampled more than once and would read 1 some of the time and 0 some of the time.
Audio engineer here. We still have a stupid dongle called the iLok. However, you can now license Pro Tools and some other software via the internet each time it is being run. Good luck going dongle-less without an internet connection though. I still have plug one into my laptop because of this.
Yes, dongles used in the 2000’s - we used parallel port dongles up until around 2008 for engine management and genset controller software protection at a large global Diesel engine company. They went to USB just after that (I think because they couldn’t buy laptops with parallel ports by then), and I left just after that so not sure if/when they were phased out.
Back around 1992 I bought an $8k dongle-protected data acquisition system from HP to run on one of their $24k HP-9836C desktop controllers. Four years later, HP was still selling the same acquisition system, but now with a dongle allowing you to use a $500 generic DOS 486 machine.
We deal with Australian made access control systems from Inner Range that still use USB hardware dongles from Safe Inc. They come up as a HASP device in device manager. The really old access control software from the same company used to use similar looking parallel port dongles to the one in this video.
The Aladdin company produced these dongles and they were quite secure. They moved to USB with some updates on security, AES on the hardware chip along with memory. Thales now owns the IP and is still selling them under the Gimelto? brand. I don't know about the one you have but the new USB ones I've worked with are very impressive, but when your software costs $50k a copy you want to protect it with hardware. I know from experience that the software is decrypted by the dongle and you can store keys on the hardware that your software uses so it's difficult to bypass (probably not impossible, just costly).
The security DVR software I use at work uses an USB security dongle. Yep. Called “CompleteView” and has “Copyright 2006” all over it. Dongle has a key tag hanging from it that says “CompleteView License Key.”
we had some for a $10,000 software called Zemax for lens design. We were told if you lose the dongle they would still charge you a few thousand to replace it.
We actually just went from dongle to software based licenses on the SCADA system I support @work. Much easier to handle it all from a central server (VM) in the data center.
I work also in Industrial automation segment (SCADA, Step7 and RsLogix5000), yes and no: Iconics uses usb dongles (which are "nicely" unrecognized when you have to reboot virtual server), Ignition doesn't have dongles (it uses an license file obtained from producer website). Last time i used parallel dongle was when i had to install GE Fanuc on an new system due hardware failure. Obviously, version is old, but it works well for the single task it is purposed.
@@jakp8777 with prices, it is like Siemens: you have to spend at least 7000€ for an full license. Like Siemens, you can use one server to distribute license across network (Factory Talk). However, i wonder why you have to pay for this software when you have to spend much more for a basic Controllogix chassis.
At my work, emergency services, our dispatch software is dongled with usb interface gadgets. Definitely still a thing as our software runs into the 'million dollars per desk' licensing and support cost.
@@alerighi maybe a third world country would, but I doubt they are potential paying customers in the first place. The usual problem with DRM is that it's usually only getting in the way of your legitimate customers, pirates just bypass it.
The company I work for sells enterprise database software, with per-machine, per-core licensing. And we discovered about fifteen years ago that even big-name companies *will* cheat on their service and licensing contracts by running the software on more machines (and more powerful machines) than they're paying for - especially when the software vendor is a fairly small company that doesn't really have the money to pursue a lawsuit to its conclusion. (We don't use a hardware dongle, though - they now have to enter some unique machine details into a form on our website and they get a digitally-signed file back which they install on the machine - so we know exactly how many machines it's running on and how many cores each one has.)
The company I work for still uses dongles to prevent unauthorized service people from accessing the onboard diagnostic software. If a client hires a third party service company they still need to contact us when firmware needs to be updated or secure sub-assembly has been replaced and needs authorization. They have to call us to go out to do the update or authorize a secure sub-assembly. If you don't have a service contract with us we charge a nuisance rate for the service.
Yeah, I worked for a small software dev house in the early 2000's, they were still using dongles when I left in 2007 (Rainbow Sentinel Super Pro). They switched to "soft" licensing for their later products.
Biesse (italian CNC machine manufacturer) still used dongles in 2013 for their XNC software which was used to load g-codes from a different file and/or create and simulate a new file
I know that the automation system that was used at the public access TV station I work at in the early to mid 00’s used a parallel dongle. I also recently bought an in the groove DDR style arcade machine that was manufactured in about 2004 that was run off an off the shelf PC that used a serial dongle for protection.
@@noodle621 This is damn impressive. I came across this video some time ago as well, I was fascinated by the amount of wire-wrapped connections he has made.
I did a quick and dirty crack of a simulation software package back in my University days. This was in the mid-2000’s and it used a Sentinel HASP USB dongle. Didn’t want to sit around all day waiting for sims to run in the computer labs so decided to reverse engineer it. It didn’t do anything smart - just checked for the presence of the dongle and that’s it, so was easy to crack.
late 1990s early 2000 a lot of academic software still had dongles. Isn't it a bit cheap of Altera not to use any of their own programmable logic for the job?
I used to run some automated pre-press software in the 90s that would batch process images in Photoshop…. I’d spend a whole day scanning and cropping, then feed the whole lot to my Mac IIfx (overclocked to a *whopping* 50hz and an outrageous 20MB of RAM) which would then spend the whole night optimising the images for print, colour correcting for the the press specs… Had a cute little ADB dongle. I must still have it in a box around here someplace. I remember selling and installing CAD packages in the 80s for pipework layout and such that had it’s own dongle carrier, and you’d add modules to it depending on which optional bits of cad software you had. Some scary high-res massive CRT screens to go with that setup. There was more money in the graphics cards than in the PC…
CAD and structural engineering software still had hardware locks both parallel and USB well into the 21st century. At least until about 2009 when I was doing IT work in that sector.
@@axa.axa. Hmmm... let's think... - Forcing wheel reinvention - Monopolistic conservatism - Making users captive - No racket/extortion-free guarantee - Preventing good knowledge sharing - Distrusting the user base
@@nashaut7635 Silly. So they had no right to protect their IP if they choose to, how they choose to. So this might make it a bit more difficult for you to freeload, but they weren't meant for freeloaders to begin with. the Sun UNIX workstations using these Altera dongles were meant for professionals making money, not dude in his basement that can't justify the expense.
In terms of modern software dongles, the iLOK is still going strong in the Audio industry. It handles licences via USB for a large number of professional software packages and plugins.
In a previous company we were actually using Dallas iButton usb dongles for this purpose, had a tiny bit of storage for keys and basically off the shelf. This was into the late 2000’s even. Funny thing was they even included the temp sensor which was standard on the Dallas 1-wire iButtons. You could even reuse for your own stuff them after we stopped using them.
I used to use lots of those, awesome devices! Stuck them all inside thermal chambers to get profiles, and even put them in canyon water to log temperature over a year.
Ah, good ol' cubase ... I recently ended up with a midi expander for Atari STs by Steinberg which I wanted to test ... turns out cracked versions of the 20+ year old version aren't easy to find or are broken (since I didn't have a dongle).
We used to use those type of parallel licenses for Mitek OCR(character level) and the Rainbow usb dongle for ABBYY full page OCR. Back when testing meant stealing throughout from production :) We had Mitek dongles that would limit the API throughput to 25 and 50 characters per second. I don’t miss the bad old days.
Software that still use dongles: most RIPs for large format printers like Onyx, Wasatch etc. Also software for sign production like SignLab, EngraveLab, Enroute, FlexiSign (partially dongled) and so on. More and more are moving over to "soft dongles" which makes life easier, no more broken dongles.
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Until some 10 years ago, a software company that made accounting apps here in Uruguay used these. Then they updated to the USB version.
Every laser display software for the ILDA standard uses usb dongles or other hardware keys to this day. Got a little usb dongle which is more expensive than a new phone. Sucks if you lose it.
I saw an USB-dongle on a cheap chinese 40w laser cutter. It was used to "protect" their printer driver for the laser cutter - and came bundled with a pirated version of CorelDraw. The irony...
Removing IC numbers on a security key seems appropriate. Our $2000 Mentor PADS PCB Software had a Dongle until a Software patch was available. Still use the software today without the Dongle. Old but functional.
Pretty much anything from PC-DMIS still does, though its USB now. The worst part is they want $2000 to replace them if they break even is you give them the broken one with the license.
Just a set of bus buffers so the parallel port stays in SPP mode to the printer irrespective of the PC port settings, and then on a correct use of the control signals enables the serial EEprom, the one control line becomes I2C clock and then a bit of the data is write data and a bit of the control register is the read data from the I2C chip there. Generally used reset and a bit combination on the data bus and control lines to disable the printer ( but not actually reset it) getting strobe, and then holding this for the duration of the query session. Often you needed a pair of bits on the data bus held high to power the I2C chip, thus the diodes, while the rest relied on the 5V from the parallel port or the printer, or if not there then the ESD protection diodes of the chips did the same job. You did get the odd printer that did not work with these, only solution was to install a second parallel printer port to drive the printer, and hope that the quirks that made it not happy would not apply to the PCI cards that would only emulate IO address space or that were out of the MSDOS allocated printer IO space, but which had drivers that hooked the BIOS and API calls instead. Pretty much no dongle worked with PCI printer extenders reliably or at all. ISA printer adaptors never had issues, from the HGC one, ones made all from SSI TTL, through to the single chip all in one cards that had 2 serial, 2 parallel, a game port and the kitchen sink all in the one chip, with the board being sized mostly for the connectors to fit it, and they did not need any drivers, fitting the ports all in the right places in the memory map with only a few configuration jumpers to set the parameters. Got some that were part of a very expensive (at the time) telephone management system, and those dongles were reprogrammable to change the ID in them to change feature sets. You used the same dongle on the PC and the programming PC for the PABX it was attached to, the only difference in them was the actual software and the dongle serial number. Do not want to think of how much we paid over the system lifetime in rental of that software, even though we were one of the few customers who supplied our own PC to use the software, thus I had a copy of the install disks. Bad thing was upgrading, as pretty much all versions past 3.12 of the software had assorted virii and trojans in them, and as the PC ran decent antivirus there was no way to upgrade, and no way we were going to connect a mystery vendor PC to the internal network, so it stayed at 3.12 forever, just manual edits of cost tables and the actual routing lists for calls, plus updating the main lookup database manually, because of changed databases in different versions.There was an interesting court case over that software. It ran very well on a retired Win98SE system, with a 40G hard drive and pretty much never fell over. Yes we were using Win98SE well into XP era, and I had a big directory of every 98SE update ever out, along with the CAB files and setup just in case, along with a separate DVD containing a full system backup less the data. Fitted in 4G, plus had a spare ready to run hard drive, spare PC with same motherboard and cards, and even a spare monitor. Did not have a spare printer, just the software thought it was printing to a HP 4MV networked printer, despite it not actually being that printer for a decade, just spoke PCL5 right.
Still used to this day for video games in arcades. Popular with the company 'Raw Thrills" Might have gone out of favor as things progress... But they are around and rarely ever fail.
The diodes are for getting power off multiple data bus lines without shorting them together. Remember that you could attach a printer on the other side of the dongle.
Fascinating to see these old school parallel port dongles. Some softwares still use but now its all USB dongles. many niche software products I've used from vector ,dSPACE et. al. still use hardware licences like this one. I think both the mentioned companies outsource these dongles from wibu systems.
In the mid 80s there was a CAD package called "VersaCad", at the time just as good as AutoCad. Well they had a box that was in series with the keyboard. It simply was a LUT box that send different codes for the characters. Super easy to hack, just monitor the output, A= .... B= ..... and so on.
Our software for industrial measuring devices has usb dongles that are bound to the mac adress of the network card that is in that specific pc. You can just program different mac adresses into the dongle if you have the dongle programming software and the program version that is allowed to run on those pc's that have those mac adresses.
There's still software which does this! Motive, the software for Optitrack mocap systems, uses a USB dongle. You can download the software for free, but it won't actually load without the hardware license key.
A company I used to work for started putting them on their older dos based machines. They were also E-fused and if you back dated your systems date it permanently locked out the dongle. It was a real pain in the ass.
I remember that one of the software packages for use with Targa (Truevision) cards back in the late 80s-early 90s had one of these which had to be installed or the software would not work. Very effective way to prevent copying of software by making it useless. If you lost the dongle you were screwed. One outfit forgot to retain theirs when they upgraded computers and were out thousands (price of the software package).
I saw usb dongles in early 2000s for some sort of home programmable embroidery sewing machine. Also heard of a network analyser that used a PC card network interface and this interface was the dongle.
PC-Doctor, a computer hardware diagnostic suite uses a USB dongle, at least it did in the late 2000s and early 2010s, though I imagine it still does. It limits how many machines you can use it in at once.
I saw a video recently where a guy had reverse engineered a license device that was on an ISA card and unlocked all of the features. That wasn't what the video was about, but he was using some kind of FPGA software in the video for his development.
Hi Dave, a lot of analytical instruments still use them. I have a few Dionex/Thermo instruments and some Konelab systems in my lab using usb dongles and they are only a few years old.
Very interesting. Back in the 1980-90's we used ORCAD and this was dongle protected unless you could obtain an educational version. We also ran XILINX which used dongles but never opened up any of these devices. I will venture into the loft one day and see what I can find. I haven't seen a PC for many a year that has either parallel or serial ports.
I have some late 90s sentinel v3 dongles. The software is still needed for some fancy hardware, the company producing the hardware and the software has been gone for over a decade. I'll start emulating it when the dongle dies.
Still using a USB dongle for Propellerhead Reason. Was a requirement in the mid to late 2000s I think, but eventually they brought in online verification as an option.
I remember the older Rockwell/Allen-Bradley RSLogix software (for PLCs) actually used a "license" that could be "moved" to and from floppy disks. The license was written outside of the filesystem to prevent you from copying it. But the easy workaround: "transfer" the license to the disk, then make an image/clone of the disk, then transfer it back... lol. Consequently, they have now switched to using USB dongles for newer versions. lol
Oh man… I remember a bit of kit for SCSI tape drives that kept track of its licenses on a “special” tape… you installed the software, put in the tape cart and it would increment or decrement the license count and “bless” that machine for use with the software. Handy thing that would allow you mount tape drive volumes as if they were hard-drives and provide (painfully slow) bulk storage. In the end the magic turned out to be a stamp of 4 changed bytes with the devs initials waaaaaay at the end of the file-system of the boot drive. Which was good to find out, as it was painfully easy to lose a partition in those days, lose the blessing, and then your license count was out of whack, never to be recovered...
Someone at a place I worked back in the 80's patched out the dongle routine in CADStar. IIRC it only checked for it when you saved the design every save but the next version checked almost every time you did something with the checking code part of the function and not a single subroutine so patching out just wasn't on.
Up until 2 years ago, I was programming scada, plc and telemetry systems with citect scada, rockwell(Allen Bradley) rslogix5000, and isagraf. All had USB sentinel dongles, and they weren’t cheap!
Years ago, we had an expensive copy of "Soft ICE" for windows. It was an in-circuit-emulator that let you break in to system routines and such; very handy for debugging our sound card drivers. the problem was that the dongle it came with was interfering with our hardware we were trying to debug, so pretty early on, one of the other developers stepped through the Soft Ice software using itself, found the routines that checked for the dongle, and patched out the check. :D
Using the dongle software to detangle the software priceless.
One could say that the dongle was hoisted by its own petard ;)
You used the dongle... to undongle the dongle!
Scott Lawrence *”I used the SoftICE to patch the SoftICE”*
Don't let the scrubbed numbers stop you Dave!
Ben from Applied Science would have dissolved the epoxy and looked at the die.
That said AvE would hit it with a hammer.
Actually there is a channel on here that all it does is decap ICs and analyse them. "Electronupdate".
For 74 series you don't need to decap them, you can just LA them. Or stick them into one of those $50 machines from China that automatically figure out what standard IC it is, they can identify thousands of standard types.
@@SianaGearz LA them?
@@xxM5xx logic analyser. You know from the layout where the inputs and outputs are, you vary the inputs and see what the outputs are doing, you'll figure out every 74 series with a little bit of effort.
Nope AvE would put in the new cnc mill and shred it!
Abom would've used the big shaper to remove its hat... 🙄😂
I used to make these back in the 80’s to protect a video library software package I was selling.
It was just a single CD4031 64bit shift register which I sent a stream of 2048 random bits to and watched to see that they came out again after a delay.
Simple but effective back in those days. Yes I did wipe the markings off the chip!
Silicon Junkie that was u? Bastard! Just kidding...
That's piss-easy to reverse engineer. Same thing in and out is an easy pattern to recognize
Did anyone even bother reverse-engineering the dongles themselves? Surely it's easier to just patch out the check in the software than to mess around with hardware... Even more sophisticated protection that decrypts it's own code using the dongle, you ought to be able to capture the decrypted code in memory.
@@KarlBaron Back then they'd put multiple checks all over the software and obfuscate the checks using math and bit shifts so there were no absolute addresses (and certainly not BIOS calls) to search for. Some checks didn't happen every time -- maybe every hundredth or thousandth pass through a code. That was to give you the confidence to use the software for awhile before it shut down.
Some software was especially nasty by returning incorrect results or creating file corruption (even the executable on disk!) if the dongle wasn't there. You were always taking the risk that there was still one check that wasn't removed that would destroy hours or days of work.
yeah but that software just got patched with a IEEE port emulator
A company I worked for as a service engineer bought some crappy data-capture software with dongles. It was only when they moved to machines with no parallel ports that we found out there wasn't anything inside the dongles except wires. I was full of admiration for the software company to be honest :-)
We had a resistor taped to the cassette port of our C64 to simulate the dongle for some piece of software, I forget what...
Dongles are still used even today. But it's mostly USB dongles today. Seen it especially in software used in research.
Not just research - the software for one of my client's big CNC steel cutting/drilling machines has a USB dongle.. as does their timeclock software!
Horrible, one buys research equipment for 200k and the only way to analyze the data is with dongled software(which has to be used by 20+ people).
Audio software, too; iLok being one of the more famous examples.
Datev, if anybody knows it outside germany/europe, ises a dongle.
lighting consoles still use dongles, but its a part of the dmx card. no dongle
Dongle secured software still exists today. VariCAD for instance has an option for dongle based licensing (they have other options as well).
Some odd access control software we use at my workplace uses an USB-dongle, just like that. At least that has a red blinky light to gaze at.
I see it relatively often in the audiovisual industry, Steinberg’s Nuendo Live requires a dongle to authorise, LSC has used permanent dongles in their lighting consoles, and malighting uses a similar concept with their "free software"
@@timothystevenson7907 Unless things have changed, Pro Tools uses dongles too, or at the very least requires compatible audio interface hardware to be used
K40 lasers also have USB dongle security keys.
As bad as the dongle is it's still better and more secure from an end user standpoint than always online DRM.
Online drm the company servers get hacked you can assume your systems got hacked as well they go under the software stops working unless you patch it.
Plus some stuff like SCADA systems you are asking for trouble like wannacry if you connect them to the internet.
Back in the 80’s, we used to use a parallel multiplexer with 8 ports. So we managed to use 8 stations with PCAD software and just one dongle.
I distinctly remember using a dongle with Edius video editing software which I always felt was a little weird as it had a PCI rendering card....
I have a piece of software on an old Mac called "NuCLear Mac" for controlling radiological sample cameras. It uses a National Instruments DAQ PCI card as its dongle, although it appears the thing is straight from NI with no modifications...
I made copies of dongles. Those usually contained a PIC microcontroller which was trivial to dump the memory from. You just etch a new board, populate it, flash it and off you go. Some sophisticated dongles had their own microprocessor, RAM, ROM, some even had a RTC. There you just copy the ROM and the parts would be off the shelf. The most clever one was using a 255 bytes EPROM that would get a challenge code and send a reply code. They used the EPROM as the controller and giant logic gate. When I opened one I was thinking "how on earth was it doing it with a single EPROM? That chip has to be special". Nope, just your standard chip, clever
The chinese are selling a software that contains all the schematics for all macbooks/iphones, they are using a dongle. Ironic on so many levels.
Zxw forever
Ironic how?
User65536 r u serious?
@@heyt54 if they've spent the time reverse engineering the boards to create the schematics and board view software, I don't see the irony.
@@phil2156 I believe they are the leaked schematics and not reverse-engineered ones. Someone took them from Apple's engineering department.
You answered that question "if any modern software uses a dongle" with your latest dumpster find - the skin machine had a USB dongle...
Oh, I remember those, and the joy when you had to use two or even three of those for various bits of CAD software; they only worked when stacked in the right order, and you couldn't push your PC all the way back to the wall. There were even parallel port ISA cards that had the connector on the inside (of the PC) so you could lock your valuable dongles inside the case.
Takes me back to the days that we had a program called FastBack that would insist you insert the original disk in the floppy drive before you started backing up your computer to other floppy disks. It took me a single afternoon to step through the program with DEBUG in MS-DOS and just jumping into and over CALL instructions until I found the subroutine that checked for the original floppy. I wrote a batch file that executed the DEBUG instructions from the command line and from then on we could leave the original disk out... I didn't even have to patch the program.
In the Land Survey business (at least here in the USA), certain programs needed a dongle to work past the demo version. We had TerraModel as our CAD (runs rings around AutoCAD for land work) from 1995 to at least 2009 when I left that company, and it was a Sentinel model from Rainbow Technologies, at least 3 of the parallel port units, and when we upgraded, we had to switch to the USB versions.
Currently (in my new job- well 6th year. lol) i have a USB Sentinel key for the Foresight DXM Survey Software, which is used for the really old Data Collector. I really only use it for file conversion, but at least it still works. So, yeah, there are still some in use out there.
many audio software packs and plugin packs had dongles through the early 2000s. Random things that didn't catch up to download-platforms and subscription services. Digidesign (Now Avid) Pro-Tools is a notable one.
Quite a few still do. iLok is the bane of my existence.
@@StompySan same. Yeah we still have iLok here too.
Not just iLok, but eLicenser. I still have to keep both of those plugged in somewhere in 2019 to access all my plugs.
I hated Digidesign for their dongles, since I got a PCI controller and a matching 8ch IO rack module for cheap a long time ago, but was never able to use it. I thought a PCI card could pretty much function as a license for software, since who is using the software without the Digidesign hardware? But I am not from this field, I just want to build a 5.1 microphone array back than
@@StompySan Lots of people hate the ilok, I'm fine with it. For the most part you can activate Visa Cloud now...
I used to be an automotive tech, and had AllData (repair manuals on cd) they would send new disks every 3 months, but you had to pay a subscription to the service and it had one of these. you never had to change the dongle but the disks would not work without the dongle. the disks would quit working just after 3 months, (they would not send the new ones if you did not pay).
Around the mid 90s, a customer of ours, used some pricey manufacturing management software which came with one of these Rainbow brand dongles. The owner wanted to run two copies. One at the office and one at home. He let me borrow the dongle. I hooked it up to my PC and put a logic analyzer on it. Found that only one data pin was used to send a serial data stream. But always the same data sequence. I made a bootleg dongle copy, in about an hour, which worked just fine.
I don't now how many versions of these security dongles Rainbow made, but due to how quickly I defeated it, I was not impressed. I'm not the "lock picking lawyer". Just some old goober, the state of California gave an engineering degree. Its from California, so take it for what its worth.
The local youth center I volunteered at had a computer with proprietary music playing software on it and a parallel port dongle in the early 2000s. Each month we'd receive an update cd with new music. During a LAN party I hooked up that pc to the network, pulled all the files and software to my pc. Music files appeared to be an encrypted form of MP3, but the best bit was the software only checked for the dongle once on startup. So I switched the dongle to my pc, booted the software, put the dongle back where it belonged and then ripped a lot of music by digitally recording it through my SoundBlaster Live! 1024 card. Of course this was back in the day when a lot of games and movies were still exchanged on LAN parties or on CD-Rs. Good times :)
Back when finding high quality music wasn't easy, so that must have been a score! Haha
@@volvo09 Yeah that was a proper score, high quality but also taking into consideration how long it would have taken to download that many songs over a 1 Mbps internet connection vs 100 Mbps LAN.
To be fair it wasn't a digital duplication if you routed it through your sound card. It was converted to analog and back again.
Bart Kuijper ha ha, that’s what VMWare was good for. After the dongle was read, save the VM state, then just restart as needed.
@@phil2156 I'm not sure actually if that soundcard recorded its analog output or if it captured its output before the dac, if I remember correctly it was the latter, courtesy of the awesome EMU10K1 chip. Either way it was very convenient and better quality than messing with a jack-jack cable :)
I used to work for Data Encryption Systems when they were based at the bosses house about a mile outside Cannington in Somerset. This was back in the early nineties, and since then the company moved to Taunton and, according to a quick google search, is still selling dongles today, even adopting the USB C standard...
Parallel port had one wonderful thing - IT JUST WORKED. You connect the cable, write to a register and boom, data bounces to your external device. No DTE/DCE, secret handshakes, parity bits, random pinouts and so on being the typical joy of serial communication.
I have several of these things here, just can't bring myself to throw them out! Two that are badged Rainbow Sentinel are for Lattice Semiconductor, another larger one for COCAD and two that are unknown. I remember also i think it was Cubase on the Atari ST used a dongle in the cartridge port.
Yep Cubase used a cartridge
Because you know as soon as you throw 'em out, you'll need one. Same reason I still have a GW-Basic manual on my bookshelf
I still have a few of the USB dongles from the 2000s, which were still in use at least up through 2005, along with their matching counterparts in parallel form - would you be at all interested in those? They were for old point-of-sale terminals, and have 1-4 lane licenses on them for Microsoft CRM (Customer Resource Management) - all older versions, of course, but I think across 3 generations of the software? Perhaps useful to do a comparison between them? Or just teardown the USB ones? If you're interested, I'd be more than glad to send them to you.
I used a altera max programming development environment back in the early 90s which probably used the same dongle. But I cracked it by tracing the disassembled startup code on the the computer which was recognizably compiled C or something and i found that I intermittently called a function which would check the dongle and then return one or zero and if zero it would bomb out an complain you needed a dongle. So I just changed one single byte in the code so that the return value was always one, and that worked, because while it frequently call this to check the dongle was plugged in, after my change it always returned true.
I was still using a parallel port dongle in 2007. It was a software for controlling an engraver we used at work. I managed to install the software and the dreaded dongle on a windows server and use multiple TSE sessions successfully though. The license stated it was for a single computer. Didn't say anything about multiple sessions. I believe this setup is still in use to this day!
Until last year, my school had a classroom full of windows xp computers that had one of these dongles plugged into the parallel port of every computer. Didn't know these were this old
While the Rainbow name may be gone, they probably merged with Sentinel and eAladdin, so now owned by Thales/Gemalto. In general, software companies would license a proprietary library to talk to the dongle and some dongle-protected software to configure both the protection in the software and the dongles sent to each customer. The protection tools could encrypt part of the program so you couldn't even read the application code without a valid dongle. Further details may still be under NDA.
Secure Computing was one of this companies names during the middle of it's life. I've got a Rainbow dongle protected release of Newtek's Lightwave 3D 5.5 for Windows NT 4 on DEC Alpha.
In 1990 when I was an apprentice I worked in the engineering department. One engineer was using this Quartus Software on a 386DX-16. They bought this software but some colleagues reverse engineered this dongle and replaced the logic with: One ALTERA EPLD :) So they used a Dolch Logic Analyzer and the Altera software to hack this, it was awesome. Unfortunately I don not have no contact to any of them anymore.
As a kid I have build some "dongles" for me and good friends in the 90's. It was a simple inverter in the data read and write lines to an external floppy drive. Other drives can't read these disks, of course ;-).
If you'd send it to me, I'd be interested in reverse engineering it.
Love your name, I love the gb. Make chiptunes with LSDJ pretty much every day!
@@novafawks Thanks. Here's a blatant plug. I haven't really done much with my YT channel so far, but I'm finally planning to start making more serious videos about Gameboy technology, programming and music this year. If you want, feel free to subscribe. If you use LSDj I have a feeling you might like the upcoming videos.
I'm sure the retro game systems could use more reverse-engineering.
So how do I build a Z80 breadBoy :)
Well first you have to start with a GB-Z80 CPU...
I can remember as a kid I played with this idea. Took a dip header and put some resistors across the pins and had the software look for the specific range. The dip header plugged into the internal game control dip socket on the motherboard.
We still use (USB) dongles for our Mentor board design & analysis tools. It's much cheaper than buying the floating network licenses yet still allows users to share the license.
My first digital electronics consulting job, back in 1983, was to design a dongle (serial port, I think). All it did was oscillate, so that it could be sampled more than once and would read 1 some of the time and 0 some of the time.
Audio engineer here. We still have a stupid dongle called the iLok. However, you can now license Pro Tools and some other software via the internet each time it is being run. Good luck going dongle-less without an internet connection though. I still have plug one into my laptop because of this.
Yes, dongles used in the 2000’s - we used parallel port dongles up until around 2008 for engine management and genset controller software protection at a large global Diesel engine company. They went to USB just after that (I think because they couldn’t buy laptops with parallel ports by then), and I left just after that so not sure if/when they were phased out.
Back around 1992 I bought an $8k dongle-protected data acquisition system from HP to run on one of their $24k HP-9836C desktop controllers. Four years later, HP was still selling the same acquisition system, but now with a dongle allowing you to use a $500 generic DOS 486 machine.
Rough!
We deal with Australian made access control systems from Inner Range that still use USB hardware dongles from Safe Inc. They come up as a HASP device in device manager. The really old access control software from the same company used to use similar looking parallel port dongles to the one in this video.
The Aladdin company produced these dongles and they were quite secure. They moved to USB with some updates on security, AES on the hardware chip along with memory. Thales now owns the IP and is still selling them under the Gimelto? brand.
I don't know about the one you have but the new USB ones I've worked with are very impressive, but when your software costs $50k a copy you want to protect it with hardware. I know from experience that the software is decrypted by the dongle and you can store keys on the hardware that your software uses so it's difficult to bypass (probably not impossible, just costly).
The security DVR software I use at work uses an USB security dongle. Yep. Called “CompleteView” and has “Copyright 2006” all over it. Dongle has a key tag hanging from it that says “CompleteView License Key.”
we had some for a $10,000 software called Zemax for lens design. We were told if you lose the dongle they would still charge you a few thousand to replace it.
Dongles and debugging with SoftICE brings back memories from the 80s
Yeah, also industrial SCADA (factory automation) software uses dongles.
They are still used in the medical equipment stuffs.
We actually just went from dongle to software based licenses on the SCADA system I support @work. Much easier to handle it all from a central server (VM) in the data center.
I work also in Industrial automation segment (SCADA, Step7 and RsLogix5000), yes and no: Iconics uses usb dongles (which are "nicely" unrecognized when you have to reboot virtual server), Ignition doesn't have dongles (it uses an license file obtained from producer website).
Last time i used parallel dongle was when i had to install GE Fanuc on an new system due hardware failure.
Obviously, version is old, but it works well for the single task it is purposed.
Marco P Rockwell software, especially licensing and rslinx is a pain.
@@jakp8777 with prices, it is like Siemens: you have to spend at least 7000€ for an full license.
Like Siemens, you can use one server to distribute license across network (Factory Talk).
However, i wonder why you have to pay for this software when you have to spend much more for a basic Controllogix chassis.
At my work, emergency services, our dispatch software is dongled with usb interface gadgets. Definitely still a thing as our software runs into the 'million dollars per desk' licensing and support cost.
frollard
yep, My laptop I use to programme DELWP / Parks Vic Radios has a security key Dongle.
Would someone pirate a software like that? I don't think there is that risk.
@@alerighi maybe a third world country would, but I doubt they are potential paying customers in the first place. The usual problem with DRM is that it's usually only getting in the way of your legitimate customers, pirates just bypass it.
The company I work for sells enterprise database software, with per-machine, per-core licensing. And we discovered about fifteen years ago that even big-name companies *will* cheat on their service and licensing contracts by running the software on more machines (and more powerful machines) than they're paying for - especially when the software vendor is a fairly small company that doesn't really have the money to pursue a lawsuit to its conclusion.
(We don't use a hardware dongle, though - they now have to enter some unique machine details into a form on our website and they get a digitally-signed file back which they install on the machine - so we know exactly how many machines it's running on and how many cores each one has.)
@@RedwoodRhiadra why would you charge more for software running on a more powerful machine? That's just dumb.
The company I work for still uses dongles to prevent unauthorized service people from accessing the onboard diagnostic software. If a client hires a third party service company they still need to contact us when firmware needs to be updated or secure sub-assembly has been replaced and needs authorization. They have to call us to go out to do the update or authorize a secure sub-assembly. If you don't have a service contract with us we charge a nuisance rate for the service.
Yeah, I worked for a small software dev house in the early 2000's, they were still using dongles when I left in 2007 (Rainbow Sentinel Super Pro).
They switched to "soft" licensing for their later products.
Biesse (italian CNC machine manufacturer) still used dongles in 2013 for their XNC software which was used to load g-codes from a different file and/or create and simulate a new file
I know that the automation system that was used at the public access TV station I work at in the early to mid 00’s used a parallel dongle. I also recently bought an in the groove DDR style arcade machine that was manufactured in about 2004 that was run off an off the shelf PC that used a serial dongle for protection.
Still common in electrical power engineering even to this day. The network license versions if available are normally massively more expensive.
I recall dongles on the systems running 3D Studio MAX and/or AutoCAD back in high school.
I remember someone made a pci card with 3 fpga and 1 of them was just to emulate a dongle
found it ua-cam.com/video/C8txvmXUIJQ/v-deo.html
@@noodle621 This is damn impressive. I came across this video some time ago as well, I was fascinated by the amount of wire-wrapped connections he has made.
I did a quick and dirty crack of a simulation software package back in my University days. This was in the mid-2000’s and it used a Sentinel HASP USB dongle. Didn’t want to sit around all day waiting for sims to run in the computer labs so decided to reverse engineer it. It didn’t do anything smart - just checked for the presence of the dongle and that’s it, so was easy to crack.
late 1990s early 2000 a lot of academic software still had dongles.
Isn't it a bit cheap of Altera not to use any of their own programmable logic for the job?
Absolutely... several products we use are still "dongled" today! Gotta have a USB key inserted at all times...
I used to run some automated pre-press software in the 90s that would batch process images in Photoshop…. I’d spend a whole day scanning and cropping, then feed the whole lot to my Mac IIfx (overclocked to a *whopping* 50hz and an outrageous 20MB of RAM) which would then spend the whole night optimising the images for print, colour correcting for the the press specs… Had a cute little ADB dongle. I must still have it in a box around here someplace. I remember selling and installing CAD packages in the 80s
for pipework layout and such that had it’s own dongle carrier, and you’d add modules to it depending on which optional bits of cad software you had. Some scary high-res massive CRT screens to go with that setup. There was more money in the graphics cards than in the PC…
Our fire alarm software is dongled. Without it, the software is crippled so competing companies cannot program our panels.
Lots of industrial PC's still use dongles .. mostly usb devices and not just 'memory' sticks .
Or ICs built into the customized motherboard
CAD and structural engineering software still had hardware locks both parallel and USB well into the 21st century. At least until about 2009 when I was doing IT work in that sector.
Scrubbing should be vandalism, like scrubbing vin numbers on cars.
Scrubbing VIN number is a criminal offense here.
Why? Why exactly should it be a crime...
@@axa.axa. Hmmm... let's think...
- Forcing wheel reinvention
- Monopolistic conservatism
- Making users captive
- No racket/extortion-free guarantee
- Preventing good knowledge sharing
- Distrusting the user base
@@nashaut7635 Silly. So they had no right to protect their IP if they choose to, how they choose to.
So this might make it a bit more difficult for you to freeload, but they weren't meant for freeloaders to begin with. the Sun UNIX workstations using these Altera dongles were meant for professionals making money, not dude in his basement that can't justify the expense.
@@axa.axa. You've just made a logical fallacy called "straw-man argumentation": I said nothing about IP!
In terms of modern software dongles, the iLOK is still going strong in the Audio industry.
It handles licences via USB for a large number of professional software packages and plugins.
In a previous company we were actually using Dallas iButton usb dongles for this purpose, had a tiny bit of storage for keys and basically off the shelf. This was into the late 2000’s even. Funny thing was they even included the temp sensor which was standard on the Dallas 1-wire iButtons. You could even reuse for your own stuff them after we stopped using them.
I used to use lots of those, awesome devices!
Stuck them all inside thermal chambers to get profiles, and even put them in canyon water to log temperature over a year.
As far as I know, CAD CAM packages still use dongles however they are USB packaged. I first encounted this package in the early to mid 90,s
I replaced a CNC mill computer a few years ago, It had one of these.
Still working today.
Cubase audio workstation software uses dongles. Effectively too as they haven't had a cracked version since 2009
Ah, good ol' cubase ... I recently ended up with a midi expander for Atari STs by Steinberg which I wanted to test ... turns out cracked versions of the 20+ year old version aren't easy to find or are broken (since I didn't have a dongle).
We used to use those type of parallel licenses for Mitek OCR(character level) and the Rainbow usb dongle for ABBYY full page OCR. Back when testing meant stealing throughout from production :) We had Mitek dongles that would limit the API throughput to 25 and 50 characters per second. I don’t miss the bad old days.
Software that still use dongles: most RIPs for large format printers like Onyx, Wasatch etc. Also software for sign production like SignLab, EngraveLab, Enroute, FlexiSign (partially dongled) and so on. More and more are moving over to "soft dongles" which makes life easier, no more broken dongles.
Until some 10 years ago, a software company that made accounting apps here in Uruguay used these. Then they updated to the USB version.
Every laser display software for the ILDA standard uses usb dongles or other hardware keys to this day. Got a little usb dongle which is more expensive than a new phone. Sucks if you lose it.
I saw an USB-dongle on a cheap chinese 40w laser cutter. It was used to "protect" their printer driver for the laser cutter - and came bundled with a pirated version of CorelDraw. The irony...
Removing IC numbers on a security key seems appropriate. Our $2000 Mentor PADS PCB Software had a Dongle until a Software patch was available. Still use the software today without the Dongle. Old but functional.
Old is good.
Pretty much anything from PC-DMIS still does, though its USB now. The worst part is they want $2000 to replace them if they break even is you give them the broken one with the license.
Parallel to serial (and maybe level) translation to communicate with a serial eeprom?
Just a set of bus buffers so the parallel port stays in SPP mode to the printer irrespective of the PC port settings, and then on a correct use of the control signals enables the serial EEprom, the one control line becomes I2C clock and then a bit of the data is write data and a bit of the control register is the read data from the I2C chip there. Generally used reset and a bit combination on the data bus and control lines to disable the printer ( but not actually reset it) getting strobe, and then holding this for the duration of the query session. Often you needed a pair of bits on the data bus held high to power the I2C chip, thus the diodes, while the rest relied on the 5V from the parallel port or the printer, or if not there then the ESD protection diodes of the chips did the same job.
You did get the odd printer that did not work with these, only solution was to install a second parallel printer port to drive the printer, and hope that the quirks that made it not happy would not apply to the PCI cards that would only emulate IO address space or that were out of the MSDOS allocated printer IO space, but which had drivers that hooked the BIOS and API calls instead. Pretty much no dongle worked with PCI printer extenders reliably or at all. ISA printer adaptors never had issues, from the HGC one, ones made all from SSI TTL, through to the single chip all in one cards that had 2 serial, 2 parallel, a game port and the kitchen sink all in the one chip, with the board being sized mostly for the connectors to fit it, and they did not need any drivers, fitting the ports all in the right places in the memory map with only a few configuration jumpers to set the parameters.
Got some that were part of a very expensive (at the time) telephone management system, and those dongles were reprogrammable to change the ID in them to change feature sets. You used the same dongle on the PC and the programming PC for the PABX it was attached to, the only difference in them was the actual software and the dongle serial number.
Do not want to think of how much we paid over the system lifetime in rental of that software, even though we were one of the few customers who supplied our own PC to use the software, thus I had a copy of the install disks. Bad thing was upgrading, as pretty much all versions past 3.12 of the software had assorted virii and trojans in them, and as the PC ran decent antivirus there was no way to upgrade, and no way we were going to connect a mystery vendor PC to the internal network, so it stayed at 3.12 forever, just manual edits of cost tables and the actual routing lists for calls, plus updating the main lookup database manually, because of changed databases in different versions.There was an interesting court case over that software.
It ran very well on a retired Win98SE system, with a 40G hard drive and pretty much never fell over. Yes we were using Win98SE well into XP era, and I had a big directory of every 98SE update ever out, along with the CAB files and setup just in case, along with a separate DVD containing a full system backup less the data. Fitted in 4G, plus had a spare ready to run hard drive, spare PC with same motherboard and cards, and even a spare monitor. Did not have a spare printer, just the software thought it was printing to a HP 4MV networked printer, despite it not actually being that printer for a decade, just spoke PCL5 right.
Still used to this day for video games in arcades. Popular with the company 'Raw Thrills" Might have gone out of favor as things progress... But they are around and rarely ever fail.
The diodes are for getting power off multiple data bus lines without shorting them together. Remember that you could attach a printer on the other side of the dongle.
Fascinating to see these old school parallel port dongles. Some softwares still use but now its all USB dongles. many niche software products I've used from vector ,dSPACE et. al. still use hardware licences like this one. I think both the mentioned companies outsource these dongles from wibu systems.
In the mid 80s there was a CAD package called "VersaCad", at the time just as good as AutoCad. Well they had a box that was in series with the keyboard. It simply was a LUT box that send different codes for the characters. Super easy to hack, just monitor the output, A= .... B= ..... and so on.
Our software for industrial measuring devices has usb dongles that are bound to the mac adress of the network card that is in that specific pc. You can just program different mac adresses into the dongle if you have the dongle programming software and the program version that is allowed to run on those pc's that have those mac adresses.
come one dave! hookup an eeprom clip reader to that 8 pin package!
There's still software which does this! Motive, the software for Optitrack mocap systems, uses a USB dongle. You can download the software for free, but it won't actually load without the hardware license key.
A company I used to work for started putting them on their older dos based machines. They were also E-fused and if you back dated your systems date it permanently locked out the dongle. It was a real pain in the ass.
Lightwave used dongles on the PC version the Amiga version the Video toaster card acted as the dongle.
Still use a that type of dongle for our mid 2000's Electrical CAD software.
Software dongles are STILL in use surprisingly.
I remember that one of the software packages for use with Targa (Truevision) cards back in the late 80s-early 90s had one of these which had to be installed or the software would not work. Very effective way to prevent copying of software by making it useless. If you lost the dongle you were screwed. One outfit forgot to retain theirs when they upgraded computers and were out thousands (price of the software package).
I saw usb dongles in early 2000s for some sort of home programmable embroidery sewing machine. Also heard of a network analyser that used a PC card network interface and this interface was the dongle.
My company was using usb license dongles well into the late 2000s. I still have to license the odd one or two
Some Radio control model simulators still use a usb dongles through today, such as Real Flight.
I have a dongle for BABY/400, the mainframe emulator from California Software. You need an old PC to run that now.
I remember using these with software for psychological testing, I always wondered what might exist inside! Thanks for the video.
I remember my dad used CAD software that required one of these.
Blast from the past :)
I've seen an addon for MS Word that helps translation workers in the 2000s that had a USB dongle.
Forensics software like FTK and Encase are dongled, they are pretty pricey with yearly licenses costing between $3,500 to $5,000 a year.
PC-Doctor, a computer hardware diagnostic suite uses a USB dongle, at least it did in the late 2000s and early 2010s, though I imagine it still does. It limits how many machines you can use it in at once.
I saw a video recently where a guy had reverse engineered a license device that was on an ISA card and unlocked all of the features. That wasn't what the video was about, but he was using some kind of FPGA software in the video for his development.
Here was the video: ua-cam.com/video/C8txvmXUIJQ/v-deo.html
Hi Dave, a lot of analytical instruments still use them. I have a few Dionex/Thermo instruments and some Konelab systems in my lab using usb dongles and they are only a few years old.
Very interesting. Back in the 1980-90's we used ORCAD and this was dongle protected unless you could obtain an educational version. We also ran XILINX which used dongles but never opened up any of these devices. I will venture into the loft one day and see what I can find. I haven't seen a PC for many a year that has either parallel or serial ports.
I have some late 90s sentinel v3 dongles. The software is still needed for some fancy hardware, the company producing the hardware and the software has been gone for over a decade. I'll start emulating it when the dongle dies.
CADstar used dongles much more recently. PADS was using them only a couple of years back and might still do.
Still using a USB dongle for Propellerhead Reason. Was a requirement in the mid to late 2000s I think, but eventually they brought in online verification as an option.
I remember the older Rockwell/Allen-Bradley RSLogix software (for PLCs) actually used a "license" that could be "moved" to and from floppy disks. The license was written outside of the filesystem to prevent you from copying it. But the easy workaround: "transfer" the license to the disk, then make an image/clone of the disk, then transfer it back... lol. Consequently, they have now switched to using USB dongles for newer versions. lol
Oh man… I remember a bit of kit for SCSI tape drives that kept track of its licenses on a “special” tape… you installed the software, put in the tape cart and it would increment or decrement the license count and “bless” that machine for use with the software. Handy thing that would allow you mount tape drive volumes as if they were hard-drives and provide (painfully slow) bulk storage. In the end the magic turned out to be a stamp of 4 changed bytes with the devs initials waaaaaay at the end of the file-system of the boot drive. Which was good to find out, as it was painfully easy to lose a partition in those days, lose the blessing, and then your license count was out of whack, never to be recovered...
Someone at a place I worked back in the 80's patched out the dongle routine in CADStar. IIRC it only checked for it when you saved the design every save but the next version checked almost every time you did something with the checking code part of the function and not a single subroutine so patching out just wasn't on.
Up until 2 years ago, I was programming scada, plc and telemetry systems with citect scada, rockwell(Allen Bradley) rslogix5000, and isagraf. All had USB sentinel dongles, and they weren’t cheap!