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From: dgary@ecsvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: Re: Softwar
Message-ID: <2870@ecsvax.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 9-Jul-84 16:46:09 EDT
Article-I.D.: ecsvax.2870
Posted: Mon Jul  9 16:46:09 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 10-Jul-84 02:32:24 EDT
References: sri-arpa.1387
Lines: 24

>From: LIN%MIT-MC@sri-unix.UUCP Tue Jun 26 04:04:00 1984
>    From: syming%B.CC at Berkeley
>    They sent us a tape with a fixed time (two months or so?)
>    payment notice and stated that the program would vanish after that time. Of
>
>I'm a bit confused.  How could this particular program make itself
>vanish without some external reference to a date?
>... Maybe the whole thing
>was a bluff?

The package in question was SAS, a large data manipulation and
stats package, running on a fair-sized machine (not a micro).  The
program repeatedly checks the system date during execution.  The
date-protection business doesn't make it impossible to run the
program after the contract expiration date, just inconvenient.  It
is more an automatic billing system than anything else.  And yes,
the idea is widely used in the mainframe world, where changing the system
date in a multitasking system would play hell with accounting
systems, payroll.....

D Gary Grady
Duke University Computation Center, Durham, NC  27706
(919) 684-4146
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