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Dongle as the name of a device was used well before 1980 within the telecoms industry to refer to BNC cable joiners of either sex (such as the RG58 cable used on 10 meg Ethernet).
WORDCRAFT was the first program to use a software protection dongle, in 1980. Its dongle was a simple passive device that supplied data to the pins of a cassette port in a pre-determined manner. That first dongle was invented and named by Graham Heggie in the UK.
The two cubic inch pendrive named lodu (33 cmA?) resin-potted first generation devices were called "dongles" by the inventor as there was no other suitable term to hand on the day. The device increased WORDCRAFT sales significantly. The distributor, Dataview Ltd., then based in Colchester, UK, then went on to produce a derivative dongle which became their core business.
Dongles rapidly evolved into active devices that contained a serial transceiver (UART) and even a microprocessor to handle transactions with the host. Later versions adopted the USB interface in preference to the serial or parallel interface.
According to a contributor claiming to be "Paul Handover, founder and managing director of Dataview Ltd.":
Although I can't remember the precise date, I well remember the conversation that I was having with Graham Heggie when he used the term 'dongle' and my immediate response that we couldn't use it as a term as it seemed vaguely vulgar. But we did and it became the generic term for a software protection key. In fact our sales of Wordcraft didn't rise anything like "eight-fold" much more like a steady doubling of sales over about a 6 month period. The biggest rise in sales were from larger organisations who had only purchased a single copy of Wordcraft. One large organisation in East Anglia, a single user of Wordcraft, turned out to have the product installed on over 200 Commodore PCs.
The other small amendment is that it didn't "make millionaires" of those involved. Certainly Peter Dowson, the author of Wordcraft, made a very good living out of the sales of Wordcraft for a number of years. But this was much more down to his commitment to a constant development of Wordcraft than the impact of the dongle.
Finally, the idea of the 'dongle' came out of a visit that I had made to our Canadian distributors, Canadian Micro Distributors (just slightly unsure if I recall the name correctly), in Milton, Ontario. They had developed a software key in conjunction with their local university and I saw this cube-like device stuck on the cassette port on the back of the Commodore. They avoided my questions about what it was doing but I guessed it was a software key. Upon my return to the UK, I rang Graham and explained what I had seen. It took him only a few days to deduce what it was doing and make a prototype. So, ultimately, we have our Canadian friends to thank for the idea of the Dongle.
