Examples of Bad Customer Support: Berkley Softworks
05 January 2026 • by Bob • Support
Back in the 1980s, I used an OS named "GEOS," which provided a Mac-like interface on Commodore's series of personal computers (both the C64 and C128). I purchased the OS and several of their applications, all of which used "serial numbers" to confirm legitimacy of ownership. Since I had spent a considerable amount on my GEOS-related purchases (which seemed like a fortune since I was a young, enlisted soldier in the military), I had no problems with GEOS' anti-piracy measures. I thought that it was perfectly reasonable for Berkley Softworks (the makers of GEOS) to ensure that other users were paying for GEOS, just as I had done.
However, when GEOS released a major OS upgrade that I had purchased legitimately, for some inexplicable reason GEOS generated a new "serial number" when I was installing the update instead of reusing the old number. As a result, none of my previously registered applications worked. Instead, each application greeted me with some sort of "You are using this software illegally" message, which was far from the truth, and this angered me to no end since - as previously mentioned - I had spent a considerable amount on my GEOS purchases.
Since I was in the military and stationed overseas in Germany, making a technical support call to Berkley Softworks in California meant staying up until the wee hours of the morning so that I could call them during their operating hours in the USA. That was a VERY expensive international call, only to be told by Berkley Softworks that what I needed to do was to box up all my GEOS disks and send everything to them, and in return they would send me all new software. Sending packages across the ocean in the 1980s was a loooong process - quite often by boat - which could take a couple weeks in each direction. Another potential delay was the fact that I was sure that Berkley Softworks probably wouldn't feel that my predicament was an urgent matter, so they probably wouldn't get back to me in an expeditious manner. Realistically speaking, Berkley Softworks' suggestion meant that I probably wasn't going to be able to use my computer for several months.
My situation was completely unacceptable to me, and rather than wait for Berkley Softworks' suggested "send and receive" process to unfold, I decided to figure out how their system of serial numbers worked. I spent a few nights disassembling their code (all in 6502 machine language, mind you), and I eventually figured out how GEOS created their serial numbers, which APIs returned the values that were checked, how each application used serial numbers, etc. I took detailed notes that I may still have lying around somewhere, and I must admit, GEOS was rather tricky about how it did things. For example: a couple GEOS applications hex-encoded their copy protection functions by XORing the actual bytecode with "0xAA" or similar value to obfuscate the code, which only slowed me down a little. In the end, I wrote an app that I called "Serial Killer," which replaced the GEOS APIs that did all their serial number checking, and in the end I was able to use my OS again. The few days that I spent hacking GEOS took far less time than sending all my disks to Berkley Softworks and waiting for them to eventually respond.
Now, whether I was angry enough at Berkley Softworks for being schmucks and therefore gave away my "Serial Killer" app to other people so they could use GEOS without paying for it is a question that is lost to time.
POSTSCRIPT:
See the Reader Mail submission from "Cpt Nathan" on page 10 of Info Magazine issue 14 (1987) for a description of similar unsympathetic behavior by the makers of GEOS.
FYI - in addition to GEOS itself, I purchased the following list of accompanying software for GEOS from Berkley Softworks: geoCalc, geoDex, geoDraw, geoFont, geoFile, geoPaint, geoPrint, geoProgrammer, geoPublish, geoSpell, and geoWrite. As I said earlier, I spent a great deal of my hard-earned cash on Berkley Softworks' products, which is why it greatly angered me when everything that I had purchased legally ceased working due to GEOS' copy protection.