"The DRM wars have gone on for a long time, long before we called it DRM. Programmers have battled aspiring software copiers with schemes ranging from the clever to the bizarre.
Although most of them were fairly innocuous, like checking a manual, others were quite destructive, rendering the install disk unusable or even in some rare cases harming the system. The regular check-ins with an activation server are annoying, but still somewhat tame in comparison."
DRM is as old as video games have been around.. one of most cumbersome and useless (IMO) was lenslock infamously found on the ZX Spectrum version of 'Elite' - 99% of the time, the damn thing never worked even when you typed in the correct answer.. not surprisingly lenslock never got used again as DRM.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...