Well, Autocad used to use a hardware dongle (you could build your own if you knew what you were doing). Then there was the scratch and sniff codes for Infocom, and I seem to remember a few games that shiped with decoder rings (much like your other pin wheel).

Of course we also had MajorBBS for multi-user back then, and 300 baud blue box modems for our commador's that you could build yourself from parts readily available from RadioShack (before they sucked).