I can tell you that piracy in the corporate world was RAMPANT in the ‘90s. I made a nice sum of money back in the day as a freelance auditor for companies trying to get their legal ducks in a row. Productivity software like Lotus, WordPerfect, Word, Excel were just mass installed off one license because there was no product activation keys or any sort of license validation methods.

Dongles were pretty commonplace on your more expensive software products from mid 90s through the early 00s. If I was publishing software that was a >$1000 a license, I damn sure would have used them.