🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <183@bucsb.UUCP>, apollo@bucsb.UUCP (Doug Chan) writes:
> >>On the TRS-80 Color Computer 3, if you press ...
> 
> The word "Microsoft" showed up, if I remember correctly, if you did a CLS (x)
> and x is beyond the range of 0-7.  

There's a reason for some of these "hidden" messages.  Back in the early
days there was a lot of out and out binary piracy.  Several folks would
just copy our software, patching out the internal "Microsofts" that they
could find with their own names.

Hidden msg code would somehow hide/encrypt the string "Microsoft" so it
wouldn't be patched.  This made
it very easy when you got to court and you could show that the bastard's
software, which they claim that they wrote themselves, inexplicably showed
"Microsoft" when you hit a secret key combination.

We won at least one court case on the basis that there were some developer's
initials in the binary that the thief couldn't explain.

Yes, you'd think that it would be a simple matter to show from the source
that you wrote the stuff, and the theif couldn't show anything but a
crude disassembly, but the judges - and the law itself - are amazingly
ignorant about such issues.    Even though you might prevail on such grounds,
it's easier and cheaper (legal fees) to blast 'em away with the old secret
message.

By the way, in the early days, a company not only stole Microsoft BASIC
by copying the binary, they then tried to sue us on the grounds that our
BASIC was the same as theirs, so we musta stolen it from them.  Truely
amazing...  (No, I don't understand the apparantly insane logic behind this -
I just heard the above "executive summary" of the situation)

	Gordon Letwin
	Microsoft