Physical media's comeback

[Lyle Romer]

If I've said it before, I'll say it again: If you are not holding it in your fat little fingers, YOU DONT HAVE IT! You think that because Netflix, Apple, Prime. et al, are streaming your favorite "obscure film" today, means they will be streaming it tomorrow? Hahaha.

I guess the same thing goes for money. Unless you are holding the cash, do you really have it?

[Frank Angel]

How about no.

Frank, perhaps "no" in the time of the Chessmaster and the Commodor 64, but sometime in the 80s I think it was, a colleague of mine asked me to install a fairly sophisticated telephone answering program on his PC (running DOS OS no less). The program was named Watson and was one of the earliest consumer Menu Tree branching Call Center systems for routing calls, playing a variety of messages and logging all activity. Quite sophisticated for its time. And from what I have seen of such programs in use by big corporations today, it was even better than some I have had to endure today Anyway, my point is, this program came on something like 10 floppies and EVERY ONE of them had a sticker on it that said just what I noted -- MAKE A BACK UP COPY. Same thing in the instruction manual. So. yes, you are probably right, perhaps not all content creators were as cavaliere as AT&T about making protection copies, but certainly I know of one specifically company that encouraged it, and if my brain memory cells weren't 84 years old, I probably could remember and name other specific programs that I worked with which DID admonish the end user to make back up copies. I didn't just fabricate it. So at least I can verify ONE author that was open to the validity of the end user making a protection copy without considering that a copyright violation.

[Frank Cox]

Oh sure, I've seen a great many programs that did the same thing, telling you to make a backup copy in bold print at the top of the first page of the instruction manual.

But there were far more that went to great lengths to try to prevent you from making copies, and I think those were more common than the other. Lotus 123 and dBase III had a copy protection scheme where you "moved" the authorization to run the program from the installation floppy disk to your hard drive, and if you wanted to put the program on another computer you had to "move" that authorization back to the original floppy disk first, then move it to the new installation.

MSDOS Microsoft Word didn't have any on-disk copy protection (as far as I can remember) and I don't think MSDOS WordPerfect did either (though I could be wrong about that).

Some programs had what you might call off-disk copy protection where they would require you to enter a random word from the instruction manual before they would run, and several Infocom adventures included some little doodads (like a plastic sundial, etc.) in the package along with the disk. You could copy the disk to your heart's content but at some point in the game you had to use that doodad to be able to answer a question or figure something out to proceed through the game. Infocom's protection scheme was one of the best I've ever seen since it was integrated into and actually enhanced the game.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I guess the same thing goes for money. Unless you are holding the cash, do you really have it?

And even then, you could argue what's that piece of paper actually? It used to be a certificate you could exchange for a fixed amount of gold. Now, it's just a vague promise with a number on it, effectively nothing more.

[Lyle Romer]

And even then, you could argue what's that piece of paper actually? It used to be a certificate you could exchange for a fixed amount of gold. Now, it's just a vague promise with a number on it, effectively nothing more.

That's true but at least you have something in your hand with a number on it vs. some bits set in the memory of a server somewhere.