Versions of the Wordcraft dongle were later produced for Centronics parallel ports, 25 pin serial ports and 9 pin serial ports. One of the greatest regrets of Graham, Pete and Mike was that they did not patent the idea when they came up with it. When Wordcraft International was formed in Derby, UK, responsibility for manufacture was transferred to Brian Edmundson who also produced the plastic moulding for the enclosure. Wordcraft's distributor at the time, Dataview Ltd., then based in Colchester, UK, went on to produce dongles for other software developers.

The first device used a commercial potting box with black or blue epoxy resin. Dowson wrote special self-modifying 6502 machine code to drive the port directly and to obfuscate the code when not in use. The shift register contained only 8 bits but with lines tied to ground or 5V at random it could provide a random number between 0 and 255 which was sufficient security for the software. Through the network of PET users in the UK they made contact with Graham Heggie in Coventry and Graham's knowledge of electronics meant that they quickly arrived at the idea of a shift register connected to the tape cassette port. The requirements for security were identified by the author of the Wordcraft word processor, Pete Dowson, and his colleague Mike Lake. The tape cassette port supplied both power and bi-directional data I/O. The dongle was passive using a 74LS165 8-bit shift register connected to one of the two tape cassette ports on the Commodore PET microcomputer. In late 1970s/early 1980s, Wordcraft became the earliest program to use a software protection dongle. Sinclair QL dongle – needed to expand internal ROM capacity in early QLs

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