Time bomb (software)

One example of time bomb software would be Microsoft's Windows Vista Beta 2, which was programmed to expire on May 31, 2007.

The first use of a time bomb in software may have been in 1979 with the Scribe markup language and word processing system, developed by Brian Reid.

Reid sold Scribe to a software company called Unilogic (later renamed Scribe Systems[2]), and agreed to insert a set of time-dependent functions (called "time bombs") that would deactivate freely copied versions of the program after a 90-day expiration date.

To avoid deactivation, users paid the software company, which then issued a code that defused the internal time bomb feature.

Instead of honoring the notion of share-and-share alike, Reid had inserted a way for companies to compel programmers to pay for information access[4] (see Events leading to GNU).