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

[Steven M. Bellovin]

In message <20001224150321.A24733 at die.com>, Dave Emery writes:
>
>
>	A note on this note - I was told back in that era by Sun field
>service people that the standard thing to do when a motherboard failed
>was to swap the ID prom from the old motherboard onto the new one, thus
>avoiding the whole license conversion problem in the first place (but of
>course also  doing wonders for the ability to track specific pieces of
>hardware and document ECO levels and the like, since a significant number
>of motherboards had swapped ID proms in which all the other information
>in the prom didn't match the actual board).

"Standard"?  It was more than that; it was the *right* thing to do.  On 
a diskless workstation, there was no other identity to the machine; if 
you didn't swap the ID prom -- which was used for the low-order 24 bits 
of the Ethernet address -- your machine wouldn't receive the proper 
boot image, etc.  Add to that the number of machines in the mid-to-late 
80's that didn't have ARP, and it was utterly necessary.


		--Steve Bellovin