There follows the complete body of a letter to Jonathan Erickson, Editor-in-Chief of Dr. Dobb’s Journal (DDJ), sent from London on 29th August 1993 and published by DDJ in the January 1994 issue. Edits by DDJ are shown in red.
Would you be so kind to extend
me the use of your Letters page to set a record straight
regarding the In his article “Examining the
Windows AARD Detection Code” by
Andrew Schulman (DDJDDJ,
September 1993)? This DDJ issue has
just started appearing in British newsagents and I have not had a
realistic opportunity to read the article firsthand before now. [run
on]
Andrew Schulman graciously credits
me with having “unraveled” part of the AARD code.
Although I am I’m certain
that Andrew analysed analyzed
the rest of the code independently, I should like to claim
prior discovery of the workings of the whole code. AIn fact, I posted a rough
but comprehensive description, identifying all tests and
(briefly) raising many of the points taken up in Andrew’s
article, was posted
to the wWindows/development
conference of a British-based bulletin board called CIX on 7th and 8th June 7—8, 1992.
By itself, this would be no
great matter. Those of your readers with a background in
scientific research will probably know of famous cases where one
researcher has—in good faith—promoted a discovery as
entirely his work, only to find (or be told) that substantially
the same work had been published already, perhaps in an obscure
journal or without full realisation of its importance.
Consider however, that in this
case the margin in time is quite large—over a year—in a
fast-moving industry. Moreover, email from me to Andrew in April,
June and July, 1992 spoke of the encrypted code in HIMEM.SYS
version 3.03 and in the retail WIN.COM. This email was
substantial—to the extent that the first of these messages
contained a device driver to trigger the non-fatal error by
preparing an FCB-SFT at a non-zero offset, much as arranged in
the article’s Figure 5 but less irresponsibly.
Of course, Andrew deserves applause for bringing the AARD code
to a wide audience, but since he has relied on some of my work for what purports to be a first
examination, propriety demands at least a note
that my analysis pre-dated predated
his, perhaps with the explanation that my findings had not
been as widely disseminated—all
the more so, given Andrew’s decision to move from a single
joint article in favour of leading with an article in his name
alone.
I contend personally that Microsoft deserves strong
condemnation for the mere existence of the encrypted
detection code and a disguised, misleading error message. This is
one reason why I told Andrew and others of it soon after its
discovery—before knowing that DR-DOS
DR DOS ran foul of the tests. In this light,
Andrew’s omission gives the impression that the AARD code is
important only because Novell was inconvenienced.
This page was created on 6th September 1998. The last significant modification was on 8th September 1999.
Copyright © 1999. Geoff Chappell. All rights reserved.
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