Personal computing history (part 1)

A long time ago, I wrote a lot of assembly language. I got very good at it.

Some years later, I was working for a company that did educational software. Back in the mid-80's a lot of PC software was copy protected. This was a major pain for us, as we had a $2000 program (back in the 80's this was even more of a painful cost than it would be now...) that broke when used on a faster (back then, 80286) machine.

So, my boss, knowing how good I was a low-level stuff, asked me to break the copy protection. No DMCA back then, I was free as a bird...

So, I started digging into the program with DEBUG. And taking notes...

After about 10 pages of scatterd notes with cryptic values written on them, I though to myself "Why am I doing this? I have a computer!" and so VIM was born. A month of effort got the basics working, and the copy protection was toast.

...to be continued...