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From: jones@quagmire.cs.pitt.edu (Randy Jones)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware
Subject: Re: Wild claims about copy protection--true?
Message-ID: <8951@pitt.UUCP>
Date: 24 Oct 90 15:33:23 GMT
References: <5946@nisca.ircc.ohio-state.edu>
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Reply-To: jones@quagmire.cs.pitt.edu.UUCP (Randy Jones)
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In article <5946@nisca.ircc.ohio-state.edu> smsmith@hpuxa.ircc.ohio-state.edu (Steve Smith) writes:
|I had a conversation/argument with a guy last night who claimed he
|had fried a monitor and several hard disks when he was trying to
|bypass the copy protection on floppy disks at various times.
|According to him, software companies PURPOSEFULLY WRITE code into
|their copy protection which, if tampered with, would make your hard
|drive attempt to read non-existent sectors or send abnormal frequencies
|to your monitor in order to fry/lock them up.  I've certainly HUNG
|a computer many times while tinkering, but it has always been my fault.
|Has anybody heard of such a thing?  And IS there even a way to write
|codes which could do either of these destructive things?  (And could
|one accidentally destroy hardware by tinkering with programs--even
|when it's their own fault?)  It sure sounds bizarre to me.

I've never heard of anything like this in PCs, but when my brother worked
on some Wang computers (many years ago) he claimed that they had part
of their copy protection scheme built in to their hardward.  If you attempted
to defeat it, I believe it would erase the hard disk.