FLUSH BUFFERS

One of my favorite bits of 4D Memorabilia is my Signed 4D v3 Key Disk.

Key… disk? What is this, you might ask? Children, gather ’round and learn of the great mystery of a key disk and of the night when mine was signed by its author in the exotic surroundings of an Egyptian temple.

In the mists time before the Internet, before all computer activity could be registered and monitored online, there was a problem: how do you keep people from accidentally using too many copies of non-open-source software? (This is the most positive way of interpreting the situation; that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.)

Computers of that epoch had an interesting and primitive portable storage medium called the floppy disk. These were much like a USB flash drive but with much, much smaller capacity — on the order of 0.001 gigabytes per device.

Typically, a software application would be distributed on a collection of these floppy disks. If the application was small, it might fit on one floppy disk which the user would use directly when they wanted to run that application. If the application was large, the user would install on their internal hard disk by starting a program on the first floppy disk, and then insert the rest in the series as prompted. This would place the entire application and its supporting files on the internal hard disk. For example, the Microsoft Office of that time was distributed on a collection of over 40 individual floppy disks — even 4th Dimension had 4 or more floppy disks. This is a strange concept today, but it certainly made sense at the time and worked rather well — unless one of the floppy disks had a corruption problem, which made installation a challenge.

When a software vendor of that time wanted to copy-protect their application, they had only the floppy disk drive as their means of deployment. Strange as it may seem, computers were only very rarely connected to the Internet. So, the vendor would distribute a specially-formatted floppy disk — usually with purposefully-introduced corruption in known locations on the disk medium that only the application knew how to decode properly. Because these floppy disks were corrupted in a controlled way they were not easily reproduced by end-users, and thus the special floppy disk became a key for the application. (Of course, very clever users could duplicate the key disks with concerted effort and especially clever users could reverse-engineer the application and circumvent — or “crack” — the copy-protection, but that discussion is best left for another time.)

Thus, for the first three major US versions of 4th Dimension, from about 1987 until 1996, the Key Disk was a carefully-guarded possession of any 4D Developer. The copy-protection scheme employed by ACIUS involved a random check: approximately every third time the Developer launched 4D, it requested the Key Disk.

In July 1994 I brought my Key Disk to the annual 4D DEVCON, my first. My hope was to have Laurent Ribardière sign it, which he did during a memorable moment at the DEVCON Party. I thought it was very cool to have the author sign his work!

The main event of the 4D DEVCONs of those days was the DEVCON Party, which was lavish and always memorable. In 1994, the DEVCON Party was held at the Rosicrucian Museum in the Alhambra District of San Jose, California. The Museum is themed after the Temple of Amon at Karnak, and is utterly surreal.

On that night, I stood on the porch of the museum waiting to get Laurent’s attention. He was there chatting with the other members of the French contingent, who were smoking cigarettes outside as they must do in the United States. At the right moment I introduced myself to Laurent, shook his hand, and asked him to sign. He was quite amused to do so, but was very gracious and honored my request. The brightly-lit surroundings, the smoke from the strong French cigarettes, and the very warm and bright night all added to the surreality of the moment for me.

And so, my signed 4D v3 Key Disk remains one of my most treasured pieces of 4D Memorabilia. I keep it on my desk to remind me of the time when the Internet was not known, and of that rather surreal night when I asked Laurent to autograph my key disk.