It may sound strange to people who were born later.<p>But in 90s these mechanisms were in infancy. It was normal for computers to auto-login and have no password at all, processes could each read entire memory on the machine. Software was cracked the moment it came out and it was assumed people bought any software because they feared legal action rather than because they had no other way to get their hands on it -- late 90s and early 2000s you could download pretty much anything you wanted, immediately, for no cost.<p>There really wasn't much possibility to protect your piece of software. If it was put on a CD somebody will either extract the key or modify your software to accept any key.<p>Windows security mechanism was no better and there were copies distributed so much that probably many people remember "standard" CD Keys even to this day.<p>And it was pretty much safe because most software did not have ability to phone home so the software developer would have no way of knowing that somebody used an illegal copy.<p>The business model was mostly companies paying for software (fearing an ex-employee reported illegal use). I remember most teens and young adults (which is most people who used computers) would never buy any kind of software, music or video. The only exception was sometimes people bought OEM software with their hardware.
Interesting! I once lost my original StarCraft CD Key. In a desperate attempt to simply install and play the game I tried converting “StarCraft” to numbers using A1Z26 cipher. Honesty didn’t know it at the time what to call what I was doing. I was just a kid! But, guess what? It worked! It only worked for local play. BattleNet did not see it as a valid key. I like to think some SWE somewhere hid that in there on purpose. Whoever you are, if you see this, thank you!
So my last name is Key, and my initials are C D, so in the mid-late 90s any time I was prompted to enter a CD Key I would always try “yes”. It worked at least half a dozen times.
000-0000000 was the key I kept in my memory in case I needed to install Visual Basic 6.0 on a new computer back in my middle school days :) great memory I forgot about, thank you for sharing the link.
I recently wanted to use a program for a short amount of time for personal use, but the trial period was only 7 days.<p>I used strace to find that it kept the timestamp of its first run in a text file, and would read that on startup. Deleting that completely reset the trial period.<p>I was pretty amazed - I know most people aren't computer savvy to bypass trial periods, but I figured there'd be third-party libraries a developer could use to effortlessly guard against this sort of thing?<p>(If I ever need it again I will buy it. I just literally needed it a couple of times for something personal and will likely never need it again)
I remember using this key to install hundreds (possibly thousands?) of school PCs back in the 1990s since I couldn't remember our volume license key. And Microsoft's terms explicitly stated the key we used didn't matter as long as an audit revealed that the number of installed systems matched the number of purchased licenses.<p>Similarly, 111-1111112 was a valid key for Office.
This gives me some serious nostalgia for those simple and naive days. Around 95' is when I accomplished my one and only successful attempt at cracking. Some company had their software downloads in password protected StuffIt archives, anyone could download the software but you had to buy it to get the password so you could decompress the archive. I really wanted to use that software and I searched everywhere on the net and on BBSs for that program or the password with no luck, so I set out to crack the archive. I made two archives, one with password protection and one without and then opened them in ResEdit, turns out the only difference between them was that the protected file had a second resource other than the data, delete that extra resource and it became a normal unprotected StuffIt archive.<p>I shared my findings to the community and within days it was all over the web and on every BBS, people where pretending they were the ones who made the hack, it was everywhere. Within weeks StufIt released a free update to fix this and I felt quite powerful at the effect I had caused. Years later I realized that my crack was banal and probably common knowledge to anyone but an ignorant teenager, most were just smart enough to not share it and ruin a good thing. So I inadvertently made the digital world a safer place.<p>Edit: thinking on it more, I doubt I was even the first person to share this information, I was just the first person stupid enough to share it on an easy to find warez/cracking site that everyone had access too. I also seem to recall that Stuffit explicitly said that this password protection was not a safe or reliable way to protect your data, if you wanted that you had to upgrade to the paid version. I probably had no real effect on anything and the new password protection StuffIt rolled out was probably already in the works when I showed up.
OEM keys for Windows 95 followed a similar structure to the retail key, albeit with a lot more digits.<p>OEM Windows 95 keys came in the form of XXXXX-OEM-00YYYYY-ZZZZZ. The XXXXX grouping represents when Microsoft issued the key by day-of-year and year, and the operating system would validate any number where the first three numbers range from 001 to 365 (or 366 for year 96), and the last two X digits were 95-99. The YYYYY group must be a multiple to 7, excluding the number 0. The ZZZZZ group is basically noise and anything is permissible in them.<p>Now you can run a Windows 95 keygen in your head. You're welcome :)<p>Actually I believe Windows 98, Me, and 2000 have a similar scheme but they obfuscate it with some algorithm to generate the 25-char alphanumeric style that Microsoft continues to use to this day. I've never dug into how it goes, but you can see the 95-style key on System Properties post-install.
If memory serves (and it was a long time ago) Win98, Office 97 and NT4 all had an easy to guess key. As long as the ABC (product type eg. Pro, Home) followed by the -xxx (first two digits added up to 9 as the last digit eg 639) -xxxx and the last 4 digits also added up to 9 as the last digit) all would be good and passed all the validation checks. A product key of xyz-000-0000 <i>would</i> work although it was a bit obvious where as something like fgh-729-32139 would sail through.... Ah, the good ol' days
It's interesting that Youtube is also recommending this to me today. I wonder what caused this coincidence. Anyone else seeing this on their Youtube feed?
I found a Half-Life CD in the street, just laying there, when it was a new game and all the rage. I guess it slipped from somebody's jewel case or the like. By some miracle, it wasn't scratched enough to be unreadable, so I went and installed it but… no key. Out of frustration I started to just type silly sequences, until arriving at one that worked: 1234567890 until filling the textbox completely.<p>Man, the sheer joy and happiness when the game installed and ran without issue. I had to tweak the settings a lot because I had a P75 with a 3dfx Voodoo accelerator card but nonetheless I enjoyed a lot of that game and I still have that disc. I hope the original owner was able to get hold of a copy and still use his original licence though.
TLDW: First three digits are ignored, The remaining are mod 7.<p>Reminds me of this classic.<p><a href="https://xkcd.com/424/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/424/</a>
Reading all these comments about people mailing floppies and cd's, it's glad I was also part of that scene too - in trading fansubbed anime titles, and trading for more copies to complete strangers. Had a geocities page, and even did transcoding with tmpgenc - back when k-lite codec packs were popular, pre VLC days.<p>Just can't believe with the right keywords, you can still see these old posts on the internet - 2002/2003 was truly different and I bet pre-2000 even wild.
I was reinstalling Win95 and Win98 so much in my youth that, to this day, I still have my Windows 95 OEM number and Windows 98SE CDKEY memorised and can recall them with no effort. 20 and 25 alphanumerics respectively.<p>I didn't know about the much smaller 10-digit Win95 keys.
I remember installing Windows 95 some time in the late 90s only to realize I didn't have a license key handy. Out of frustration I entered all 1s in. I have never been more surprised at something working unexpectedly like that.
You've posted this 12 hours ago, which was roughly when it showed up in my youtube feed.<p>Did you post this, because it showed up in your youtube feed?
MS activation mechanisms always remind me of this video: <a href="https://youtu.be/rXHu9OmLd8Y;" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/rXHu9OmLd8Y;</a> how Microsoft Bob was used to initialize a chunk of random data used with the cryptographic activation mechanism of Windows XP.