Old licensing dongle. Was used to run protected software with a valid licensing key... pretty useless now tbh.

Are the tops of those ICs sanded or scuffed? It that part of the copy protection mechanism? Is there no ROM holding a key of some sort, and just some "secret" circuit that the software checks for?

I think I saw a couple of dongles once or twice back in't day, protecting some software that if the publisher hadn't have spent time/money on the hardware and corresponding software, they probably would have made more money even after sales lost to piracy. The dongles had a bad reputation for reliability or compatibility, meaning the customers of the software publisher tended to be the ones who suffered: and nothing changes with copy protection.... other than cloud computing. Get the program off the user's computer and onto one controlled by the publisher, and copying the software becomes a thing of the past.

Edit: The people behind this wizzkey are shit hot! I "Asked Jeeves"[1] about wizzkey and after accepting the invalid security certificate for their website, there looks to be some minimal info here https://www.wizzkey.com/ . Your browser will moan about the security being bad, just do not put any personal data in and assume you are being spied on 😀

[1] Googled

Think bigger.

I've seen those things protecting very expensive software like CAD/CAM, engineering solutions, accounting...

In those cases the software costed hundreds or thousands of dollars, no wonder why they wanted it protected.

Indeed there's missing a rom chip, so I was a little confused about how this works.
Maybe it is a custom circuitry indeed, and users may not know what they supported on to connect the right data lines or something.
In this case it can literally be the key to 'any' software that uses such a key...

Just use Wayback and you can find:
http://web.archive.org/web/20030115051029/htt … zzkey/wkrl.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20030218193416/htt … zkey/wkfaq.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20030218193456/htt … y/download.html

similar to what AutoCAD used for early versions in late 80's early 90's. some of those ic's may be eeproms.....

The 8 pin ic's could be serial I2C eeprom
(like this : https://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/21709c.pdf)
or either microwires eeprom in a device so old

https://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/21929D.pdf

They are small but there's plenty of room to store keys and other
stuff.

Even 8 pin microcontroller could be used like some old PICs and
BTW there's no need of eproms or controller, I remember an old
electronic magazine from the late 90s that published a simple
serial dongle with just a couple of ic's.

Edit.
I found the magazine

www.introni.it/pdf/Elettronica%20Flash%201997_01.pdf

page 75.

It turns out that a single IC is enough!

A friend of mine actually built it in the days and it was
working fine.