A Brief History of the Dongle
In 1980, the first program to use a software protection dongle was introduced. The WORDCRAFT program used a simple passive device that supplied data to the pins of a Commodore PET's external cassette port in a pre-determined way. In the absence of a suitable term, the inventor of the two-cubic-inch (32 cm3) resin-potted gadget named this first generation device a 'dongle'. The distributor of the device, Dataview Ltd., then based in Colchester, UK, then went on to produce a derivative dongle, which became their core business.
Many years ago, Rainbow Technologies (now SafeNet) claimed on their website that the term 'dongle' was derived from the name "Don Gaul", a developer who decided to invent a way to prevent his software applications being used without permission. Though completely untrue, this urban myth lives on.
Over the next few years, the dongles evolved into an active device that contained a serial transceiver (UART) and a microprocessor to handle transactions with the host. The USB interface was later adopted in preference to the parallel or serial interface.
In the last few years, a number of the major dongle manufactures have been taken over: Aladdin bought Eutron (a european dongle vendor), before being acquired themselves 6 months later by SafeNet. After this transition, Rainbow (SafeNet), Aladdin (HASP) and Eutron merged to a single entity.
Modern smart cards offer similar features as modern dongles, but are more secure and powerful by design than traditional MCU based dongles. It is therefore believed that the dongle market may be eventually be overtaken by smart cards. A number of dongle manufacturers are now producing one-chip dongles, which combine the smart card and the smart card reader in the same chip, making a smart card dongle easy and stable.
