While obviously totally made up, it nonetheless became something of an urban legend.
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He didn’t drive a fancy car, but dressed in his favorite Comdex T-shirt and faded blue jeans, he set out to change the course of the software story,” the fable started. This has led to fun stories, the most colorful of which was invented by the tech company Rainbow Technologies, which, in a 1992 advertisement than ran in Byte, invented a character named Don Gall who they claimed the device was named after. Of course, people aren’t aware where they actually came from in the first place, as The Atlantic’s Garber implied. In fact, they got more sophisticated, adding their own processing capabilities that interacted with the software being used. But dongles for more high-end or specialized software products, along with employee security, never really went away.
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Once unscrambled, the program is loaded into the computer’s memory and runs in the normal way but it is not difficult to remove the built-in checks.įor games, these approaches were eventually replaced by copy-protection schemes inside manuals or by different distribution approaches, like shareware. The key to this simple encryption is held by the dongle which passes it to the computer’s operating system (the program which coordinates the computer’s operations). Instead of supplying a program in plain computer code, some or all of the instructions are scrambled. The dongle system has been refined by some companies. One expert says this task takes about two hours.
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Unfortunately, there is nothing to prevent the owner of a dongle-protected program from displaying the program code on his computer screen and removing the dongle check from it. Most dongles do not prevent programs from being copied, but they stop the copies from being used, since each copy needs a matching dongle to work. If it has not been plugged in the program will not run.
A program protected by a dongle contains a routine that asks a computer to check whether the dongle is present and sometimes to read a code from it. The dongle is a small plastic box which plugs into one of the ports at the back of a computer. In technology publications, the first references I see date to October 1981, in issues of New Scientist and Byte, both in reference to antipiracy technology.Ī 1984 New Scientist piece explained the dynamic that led to the growing popularity of dongles throughout the period, but noted that despite their goal of security, they ultimately were seen as easy to break by technical users: It suddenly showed up in newspapers around 1984, as did one of the earliest patent filings regarding dongles, in the United Kingdom. A 1984 article from The Guardian, in reference to Clive Sinclair’s ill-fated Sinclair QL computer makes a reference to dongles as “an ancient piece of computer jargon,” despite the fact that it’s one of the earliest references I can find in a mainstream newspaper. Megan Garber, in a 2013 essay in The Atlantic discussing the origin of the word “dongle,” which she noted was fairly unclear.
But that hasn’t stopped people from guessing.”
“We don’t know much, for sure, about the word that has been a source of so much frustration and controversy and, regardless, ubiquity. Ultimately, the problem the dongle solves may never truly go away.
But despite all these efforts to simplify my cabling life, dongles rule everything around me.
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