The Franklin Ace 1000 was a computer made back in the 1980s. The manual for the computer explained how to break copy protection on programs purchased for the computer. It’s funny how much things have changed, and how much they have stayed the same.

Believe it or not, however, there are programs out there that are expressly designed to PREVENT you from backing them up. They can’t be copied unless you’re a teenage computer genius with plenty of free time on your hands. You can try ‘til doomsday and you will never make a successful copy of them. This may be a user’s manual, but when it comes to some programs that you buy off the shelf, you’re more in a position of being used than you are of being a user.

What’s worse is that some of these programs are downright diabolical! They fool you into thinking that you’ve succeeded in copying them. You spend ten or fifteen minutes typing data onto the diskette. Then, all of a sudden, just after you’ve typed in your 10,000th character (or some other magic number) the program checks itself to see if it’s a copy. This is one function of the program that the programmer has tested and restested so that it works perfectly every time. When the program discovers that it is a copy, your program, along with your typed data, goes bye-bye. Fortunately, the ACE can’t explode under program control, because some programmers will stop at nothing to punish you for making a copy of their program!

There is a way to fight back, though. You might not win the war, but you can go down swinging. All you need is a weapon, a program called a nibble copier. It’s a cute name, but its purpose in life is malevolent. It’s designed to copy uncopiable programs. Make that copy!

The problem is that a nibble copier won’t take out everything you throw against it. Some programs are vulnerable to it; others aren’t. There are a number of such nibble programs available, however, each capable of copying a different group of programs. By buying two or three nibbles, you’ll have a pretty good arsenal to use against these ghouls. You still won’t be able to copy every single program that comes down the pike, but you’ll be successful a fair percentage of the time.

Unfortunately, nibble copiers are expensive, and they take time and skill to use effectively. Two examples of high quality nibble copiers are Locksmith 4.1 TM and Nibbles Away TM.

There probably isn’t any ideal solution to the problem, short of refusing to buy uncopiable programs. That’s not practical, however, since nearly every program of any value has some sort of copy protection built into it. Someday, enough consumers will get fed up with this nonsense to put an end to it. It hasn’t yet, though.

http://www.ironicsans.com/2010/02/they_dont_make_computer_manual.html