SoylentNews

Snotnose [soylentnews.org] writes:

What do you do when it's time to upgrade an ancient system? Put an image in an emulator and see what it does. But what if the program requires a hardware dongle on the printer port? Therein lies a story. [dmitrybrant.com]

This software was built using a programming language called RPG (“Report Program Generator”), which is older than COBOL (!), and was used with IBM’s midrange computers such as the System/3, System/32, and all the way up to the AS/400. Apparently, RPG was subsequently ported to MS-DOS, so that the same software tools built with RPG could run on personal computers, which is how we ended up here.

This accounting firm was actually using a Windows 98 computer (yep, in 2026), and running the RPG software inside a DOS console window. And it turned out that, in order to run this software, it requires a special hardware copy-protection dongle to be attached to the computer’s parallel port! This was a relatively common practice in those days, particularly with “enterprise” software vendors who wanted to protect their very important™ software from unauthorized use.

Original Submission