About Gilmore's letter on IBM&Intel push copy protection into ordinary disk drives

[David Honig]

At 10:19 AM 12/22/00 -0500, Peter Wayner wrote:
>I don't see how they will be able to distinguish between the truth 
>and a lie when a guy calls up and say, "uh, my hard disk crashed. I 
>need to install it on a new machine." They either authorize it or 
>they don't. In fact, they'll probably have to automate the process 
>because it's so expensive to have an actual human on the other end.

Just a historical anecdote.  Back in the old days, software
could be linked to the unique ID on Sun motherboards.  To move
software to a new machine, you called and maybe faxed something
signed (with a pen) to the effect that you weren't ripping them off.

This was before the software-based floating licenses became 
popular.

dh