For what I recall of it, there is some encryption chip in it.
Oh no !! Boy that's a lot more involved / fancy / sophisticatd than I anticipated for such an old device !
When I worked at STEIM in Amsterdam, there was a guy who looked into it and he made a cracked version of the software, but don't know how he did it. Might be that I still have it on a hard disk somewhere
Wow so it can be done ! Yeah do keep in touch, crossing fingers you can find that cracked version somewhere !
The versioning is also a bit odd, because the dongle says OrCAD/STD/3 and the disks say V1.21aH, but there is also a disk with V4.42. It is to far back to recall what is what and why
I think it's quite simple.... like most S/W "suites", it's not monolithic, it's a patchwork of various components, that are developed independently, from a source code perspective, so they each have their own version number. Then the "suite", the uimbrella collecting all the various component, the "high-level" layer that gets sold to the customer, has a version number of its own as well.
So here the red disk v4.42 is the version of the overall "ORCAD" S/W suite, then V4.40 is the version of "ESP3, the IDE, then V1.21aH as we can see on the labels, is the version of the "SDT" schematic capture tool.
So, in short.... this set of disks is "ORCAD" version 4.4
I would think that's what it should say on the cover page of the main manual and box, if you still have the cover for it.
Opening the dongle is not a simple click, but the seams give way a little bit. Will see if it is willing to pop open with some tools.
Give it a try and report with pics, of course !