This company published expensive software in the early 1980’s. In those days there was a lot of pirated copying going on, so along with that expensive software the company included security.

Vault’s security was called “Prolok.” It was a program that checked to be sure it was running from it’s original disk. There was a tiny spot placed on that disk that the security program could find as a condition to running the expensive software.

Vault was defeated in court trying to defend their product. In my opinion the media error might not be considered software. View the Wikipedia page explaining the case. Vault Corporation’s legal suit

After some thought, I now believe the painting, 46605 by Jeff Devitt is a good faith iteration of one of Vault’s security disks; complete with the creation of the track error.

Also very noteworthy, University of California at Santa Cruz seems to be a magnet for embezzlers.

Now that you know about Vault Corporation and the PROLOK security probuct, I need to confess that while their employee, I stole some blank disks. The blanks were delivered to me and I manufactured the disks to have the spot removed from the media. After the fingerprinting, they were then formatted and loaded with software. About a hundred disks didn’t make it through. I took them home and used them with my Commodore 64 computer.