Adventures in PC Emulation
Vault was conceived in 1979 and incorporated in 1983. There's not much information about the early days of the company, but 1983 was a busy year for them. The trademark filing for Prolok, their first copy-protection product has a first-use date of March 1983. That same year would see several full-page, color advertisements in various PC magazines, making them one of the major competitors of firms like Softguard. Compared to the modest back-page adverts from other copy-protection firms, Vault's advertisements were very slick - clearly put together by a professional ad agency.
One of Vault's biggest customers was Ashton-Tate, makers of the industry-leading dBase database software and later owners of the Framework office suite. Both dBase III v1.0 and Framework 1.0 would see releases incorporating Vault's Prolok copy protection. Ashton-Tate was even impressed enough by Prolok to invest $500,000 in Vault, acquiring a 20% interest in the company.
Prolok differed from other floppy copy-protections in two significant ways. First, the protection did not rely on unusually formatted diskettes, crazy track layouts or non-standard sectors. Instead, the protection relied on deliberate damage to the disk surface, which Vault referred to as a "fingerprint."
