Adventures in PC Emulation  is starting a series of articles investigating various PC floppy protections, working in MartyPC. The Formaster corporation, headquartered in San Jose, CA, sold disk duplication equipment such as the FORMASTER Series One.

Such machines may have been attractive investments for medium-sized software houses. Not only would it allow a software company to reproduce their own diskettes in bulk (up to 326 disks per hour, depending on options), the Formaster Series One could also add basic copy protection to each disk.

Formaster called their copy protection technology “Copy-Lock,” a name which, unfortunately, several other producers of copy-protection technology used for entirely unrelated methods.

Copy-Lock ended up not being a terribly sophisticated protection, but it is a good start to the series, laying down some of the important concepts and techniques that more advanced protections will build on.

Read the complete writeup here.