Is it really fair to call these such algorithms "security through obscurity"?

By that logic, wouldn't real symmetric crypto also be considered the same, since it's still just math that similarly swaps the data with other bytes, based on an "obscured" password or key?

It’s worth getting the Quake shareware disc for the NIN soundtrack. Official track names are now available following the vinyl release a few years ago. This is the only CD release of the soundtrack. Just don’t forget to skip track 1.

Man, those CompUSA and Computer City pictures take me back. Spent too much time there (when the 7300 was my regular Mac, the CompUSA "Apple store" was my primary source of software). Probably still have some of those free Computer City floppies in a drawer somewhere.

Man, if I were id, I'd sue the hell out of Testdrive for selling me that broken security system...

Ha, I remember buying the shareware disk and unlocking every game on there. Plus you got the soundtrack which was pretty cool.

Was there anyway to make this work unless every CD was burned with a different key used to do the encryption?

I did exactly this thing when I was a broke teenager. The files in my ID1 directory that I shuffle around from computer to computer to this day came from that disc 30 years ago. (I still have the disc, but not the case.)

I did, however, purchase Quake II and III when they were released. And many years later bought Quake on Steam. I think they got their money's worth from me after all.

(There were some who believed that making the shareware disc easily-crackable was an intentional stroke of genius. It got people who couldn't afford the full retail version to buy the game and expand its popularity. After all, $10 was a fairly ludicrous amount of money to pay for shareware game. Shareware CDs tended to be $5 on the high end, or free with most computer/gaming magazines.)

This screw up ended up costing id Software millions in sales. With the Doom franchise they only included the first episode in the shareware version. But to save a buck I guess they decided this was better than mailing a second CD with the full game on it. Then doubling down on that greed by putting their entire game library on the disc. This is right about the time John Romero and John Carmack parted ways, can't help but wonder if this debacle played a role.

how come the pictures in the store say Compu USA? I remember it as CompUSA and this image seems to show the same thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CompUSA_Santa_Clara_2.jpg

is it an AI-generated image of 1990s CompUSA?