25 Arguments for the Elimination of Copy Protection

“25. Lenslok. And all its spiritual descendants. Which are many
and varied.

“I managed somehow to avoid Lenslok back in its heyday in the
mid-1980s, but just reading about it makes me gnash my teeth, It
was an oddball prism-based gadget invented in the mid 1980s to
copy-protect games on the Atari 400/800, Commodore 64, Sinclair ZX
Spectrum, and other pioneering home computers. You held the Lenslok
up to your PC’s display to read a secret code that let you
unlock a game. But “[in] order for the Lenslok to work
correctly the displayed image has to be the correct size,”
says Wikipedia. “This meant that before each use the software
needed to be calibrated to take account of the size of the
display.”

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