So, yeah. The "article" is incorrect from nearly the get-go about the "wild west" Atari age.
No, it is not AI generated. It was based on my research.
I think there is a mix-up here between Atari home consoles and Atari home computers.
In that section I was talking about early console platforms such as the Atari 2600, where the cartridge interface itself had no lockout/authentication mechanism comparable to what Nintendo later did with the 10NES. That is why third-party cartridges could exist and Atari’s main response was legal rather than technical.
What you describe for the Atari 800 is real, but it belongs to a different context: the Atari 8-bit computer line, especially floppy-disk software, where copy-protection tricks such as intentional bad sectors and timing-based checks were indeed common.
So I agree that Atari computer software often used copy protection, but that does not contradict the point I was making about the early console era.
(it was an NV GPU)
If you're referring to Windows, this is not very walled at all. You barely need a computer to write and release windows apps, let alone money.
Office, perhaps? Or a variety of other products.
However, Windows also has many, many, walled garden things bolted onto it. You aren't distributing your own drivers without Microsoft's approval. You aren't running Microsoft Office on Wine. You aren't connecting to Active Directory without Microsoft's blessing. You aren't making group policies that work on Linux for MDM. You aren't manufacturing Windows devices, at all, unless they meet Microsoft's system requirements and mandates (e.g. a Windows icon on the keyboard). Your BIOS must follow strict rules about where the activation key is fused. Etc.
In that respect, Windows is only open from an end user perspective. In all other respects, it is closed, and it is closed tightly.
Only kernel drivers.
> You aren't connecting to Active Directory without Microsoft's blessing.
I think you're talking about EntraID. That is true enough. You can just spin up Windows Server and create a domain controller, no problem. You don't need Microsoft for domain services, though - you can use other domain controller types. (You don't get GPO and other things - that's not a 'walled garden' thing, that's a feature set which other systems don't have)
> In that respect, Windows is only open from an end user perspective. In all other respects, it is closed, and it is closed tightly.
Not so tight as you seem to think. And anyways, I was specifically referring to building windows apps - which you did not disagree with. You absolutely can pull down various free tools, build an app, package it up as a .zip or .msi and distribute it from a variety of places. The Windows app store is a walled garden, but you don't have to use it.
My dad would never cheat or do anything illegal even though he was an EE who could’ve done the mod himself. Today he might do it but there was a strict no stealing policy even for digital things. Like the time he freaked out because I was grabbing stuff from The Scene and wrote down a bunch of terms to research, he saw the word Warez and freaked out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7VwtOrwceo
I like this video too, Tony Chen explains the overview of Xbox security system.