I remember helping a teacher at school who had installed a CopyIIPc card on one of our computers. They used it to make everyday copies of the master disks of the copy protected educational software we used in our room full of Sperry IBM compatible PCs.
The card went in between the floppy controller and the drive and could do a pretty good job at duplicating all the physical copy protection tricks of the time.
They copied a lot of stuff, not for pirating reasons but simply because they were literally 5 1/4" floppy disks back then and school kids were not kind to them. Either it was simply jamming them into the drives, or touching the exposed disc surface, or chucking them around the room, those disks didn’t last long.
School is where I first saw these. Every classroom had bootleg disks. They’d buy one copy of a program and then copy one for each classroom. Later when moving to PC’s from the Apple II, they’d clone each hard drive in that school from a master drive.
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