FLUSH BUFFERS

’Way back in the day, ACI employed a form of copy protection for 4D Server that required a special hardware device called a dongle. I still have one!

The 4D Server dongle was designed to connect to a Macintosh computer through one of its Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) ports. It’s inline, which means that you could connect something else to it so you wouldn’t lose the use of the port. Macs of the day typically had only two ADB ports, so this was an important feature.

The label on this dongle reads:

4D Serveur ACI
92008288
Made in France

Unless the dongle was attached to the Mac, 4D Server would not start. The devices were occasionally prone to failure, and ACI eventually phased them out and replaced their copy-protection scheme with a key disk. The process for moving the activation token from the dongle to a key disk was something the developer could do themselves. I had to do it once myself, and I can tell you that it was a very nervous operation fraught with what felt like black magic and peril — what if something went wrong? There was another Easter Egg involved in the process, which I’ll save for another post.

Because dongles are copy-protection, they cry out to be broken. I recall breaking the copy protection once — as an academic exercise only, of course! — by spending many hours in Macsbug, the venerable 68000 debugger and disassembler. The scheme was not complex, but it was effective.

I keep this dongle as an interesting artifact from before the dawn of the Internet Age.