That’s right — this little device is what stood between me and the ability to run an even older piece of software that I recently unearthed during an expedition of software archaeology.
For a bit more background, I was recently involved in helping a friend’s accounting firm to move away from using an extremely legacy software package that they had locked themselves into using for the last four decades.
This software was built using a programming language called RPG (“Report Program Generator”), which is older than COBOL (!), and was used with IBM’s midrange computers such as the System/3, System/32, and all the way up to the AS/400. Apparently, RPG was subsequently ported to MS-DOS, so that the same software tools built with RPG could run on personal computers, which is how we ended up here.
This accounting firm was actually using a Windows 98 computer (yep, in 2026), and running the RPG software inside a DOS console window. And it turned out that, in order to run this software, it requires a special hardware copy-protection dongle to be attached to the computer’s parallel port! This was a relatively common practice in those days, particularly with “enterprise” software vendors who wanted to protect their very important™ software from unauthorized use.
Sadly, most of the text and markings on the dongle’s label has been worn or scratched off, but we can make out several clues:
The words “Stamford, CT”, and what’s very likely the logo of a company called “Software Security Inc”. The only evidence for the existence of this company is this record of them exhibiting their wares at SIGGRAPH conferences in the early 1990s, as well as several patents issued to them, relating to software protection.
A word that seems to say “RUNTIME”, which will become clear in a bit.
My first course of action was to take a disk image of the Windows 98 PC that was running this software, and get it running in an emulator, so that we could see what the software actually does, and perhaps export the data from this software into a more modern format, to be used with modern accounting tools. But of course all of this requires the hardware dongle; none of the accounting tools seem to work without it plugged in.
Before doing anything, I looked through the disk image for any additional interesting clues, and found plenty of fascinating (and archaeologically significant?) stuff:
We’ve got a compiler for the RPG II language (excellent!), made by a company called Software West Inc.
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