These are not examples of crippleware; they are (except for the IBM case) examples of designing the software so that the hardware is operated without damage. This is what is expected of a reputable manufacturer.
Crippleware consists of making a special effort, doing extra software development work, to reduce the performance of the product below its capability.
Gene
We almost had government mandated (hard)crippleware when congresscreatures Gore and Waxman introduced bills to mandate a Marantz fidelity restricting chip into digital tape recorders to protect the CD industry. What averted this was not CD writers, but rather Sony's purchase of CBS Records. --rwg
________________________________ From: Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> To: Eugene Salamin <gene_salamin@yahoo.com> Cc: math-fun <math-fun@mailman.xmission.com> Sent: Thursday, January 1, 2009 6:45:16 PM Subject: Re: [math-fun] IBM407 Card Lister Model E8
Re Crippleware:
A significant source of crippleware is marketing brain damage, but there are also plausible explanations for crippleware:
1. I heard of a truck company in Indiana that "detuned" any engine that exceeded the advertised horsepower. They claimed that the increased horsepower put an unplanned stress on the transmission so that it would fail earlier than expected.
2. The southern NASCAR-type mechanics during the Vietnam war would sometimes "hotrod" the battle tanks, making their MTBF less than 100 miles. With these and other problems, a good fraction of the tanks spent their time either towing other tanks, or being towed themselves.
3. The wear in some mechanical devices goes up dramatically (more than linearly) with increased speed, so that the lifetime is severely compromised.
4. If you are careful, you can utilize low-octane gas in an older car which was designed for high-octane gas. However, it requires a relatively skillful driver to avoid damaging the engine.
5. The IBM 1403 chain printer had its character set sequence cleverly designed so that the probability of a large subset of hammers being fired simultaneously was essentially zero. However, if you studied the chain and then ordered the printer to print a certain sequence of characters, you could easily break the chain, which would wreak havoc on surrounding portions of the printer. If this happened too often, IBM would have been forced to include software to disallow those dangerous character sequences. I guess if IBM had copyrighted those sequences, then such software would have been the first "DRM" software? ("DRM" = Digital Rights Management, used to prevent the copying of copyrighted materials.)
5. The Xerox Alto "personal" computers were built from "standard" 74xx-type chips. However, they hadn't used the best "timing" tools, so some of the paths were too tight for reliable operation. As a result, some microprogramming operations worked only on a subset of the Altos. Due to the requirements for synching with things like the display, one couldn't simply slow down the clock. In the design of many chips today, "timing closure" is one of the last tasks to be done after verifying that the data paths work logically. "Timing closure" then tells you how fast you can run the chip without violating various setup time requirements. Circuits that are too close to the edge timingwise may fail when the temperature goes up a little.
6. The whole "digital revolution" is the recognition that standardizing signal definitions and timings mean that when predicting the future digital behavior of a circuit, the details of the digital mapping to the analog circuitry can be safely ignored. From time to time, you can "improve" a circuit in some dimension by "hacking" it (by taking advantage of the details of a particular circuit), but some of these improvements probably won't survive the next series of job layoffs or the next product cycle.
At 09:58 AM 1/1/2009, Eugene Salamin wrote:
The lucky gnurds queueing up for time on the RLE-PDP1 were indebted to the unlucky tools who chose instead to hang out at the Civil Engineering Dept IBM1401, which, a tool told me, had a 407 E8 that cost $tens of thousands less because it was only 2/3 the speed of a regular 407. By virtue of a plugboard with an extra relay circuit to discard every third cycle! Yank the relays and be fully upgraded. Except during scheduled visits by the IBM field service representative.
It amazes me that IBM was able to maintain its hypnotic sway over market opinion while pulling stunts like that.
Perhaps someone at the Computer History Museum can propose an earlier example such a deliberate disfeature. Perhaps even provide a name for the practice. (Failing which: disfeaturement.)
geb trats --rwg
EDGAR T IRONS DENIGRATORS _______________________________________________ This practice is very much alive in current business, whether a pure software product, or software embedded in some device. The name given to such practice is "crippleware".
Gene
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