Time for a break from work! In this weekend edition of the Mad Ned Memo, we take a nostalgic look back at software piracy and copy protection in the 1980's.
My "pirate" days were in the mid 90s. I lived in a small town. Dial up internet was a thing, but mostly in the cities. We had no local number to dial so if you wanted to connect you had to go long distance. The local PC shop set up a BBS system which was cool. There were a couple of lame BBS games and a message board and a file sharing tool. I remember posting a copy of "Descent" on there. It got removed promptly and they reached out to tell me that they could not host "illegal" software on their business BBS. So I did some research and made my own BBS. I talked my parents into another phone line and put the message out and my small BBS became a game trading mecca of sorts for about 15 of us living in the middle of nowhere. Of course downloading things at 14.4k sometimes took all night... Good times!
This article brought back great memories of high school days, getting together with a friend, bringing our 1541 floppy drives to each other's house so we could copy games faster. I didn't have access to a BBS, so the best sessions were when we got a visit from a local hacker who would give us disks and disks full of games and copy programs. It wasn't as weird as your situation though: the guy went to our school and we knew him.
When we were old enough to have part-time jobs, we would get a group of 3-4 friends and buy a new game. We would copy it, and then photocopy the manuals (my Dad would take them to work and copy them for. Remember when it costs 10 cents to make a photocopy?). Then a friend got a job on a night cleaning crew, and he would let us in to places he was cleaning and we would use their photocopiers. I feel kind of bad about that now...
My era was the early 2000s. So lots of burning CDs and DVDs, torrenting, key gens, massive wallets full of discs to share with friends.
The memory that jumped out at me the most while reflecting on this time is a little odd. There was a well known group that you could rely on for rips and their key gen programs always had the most amazing music! Like up-beat, chip tune, techno stuff. Hilarious, but made me so happy.
Your story so resonated with me, except my platform was an Apple ][+. There was one kid in our high school that had an abundance of the pirated games and we had almost the same story--going over to his house, not having anything to trade that he didn't already have, but trying to get in his good graces for the latest cracked games. These were all on Apple 5 1/4 floppy disks. I remember each of the games had a special load screen put in by the original person or team that originally cracked the game. Lots of colorful names and art work. This was around 1982 or 83.
I live outside USA so things are / were bit different. In 80's we kids were moving around all the time and folks rarely had any idea where we were or what we were doing. When I was like 11 - 13 years old I met this dude that was 10+ years older than me. Can't really recall how we met the first time but he was into computers and I ended up spending a lot of time around his place playing, "programming" and chatting. We eventually became very good friends and had a lot of awesome memories (like the first analog modem call across the country and so on). Sadly we've lost contact nowadays. (As a parent I'd be quite alarmed if my kid said to me that he is going to spend some time with some 20+ guy :D ).
Anyways, good story! Permanently etched in my memory from those times is the sound of the modem, punching holes to floppy disks to make them 2-sided, ruthless gaming sessions where everything was allowed (including kicking on the shins and disconnecting the other player's joystick cable), warming toes on external PSU and so many others.
I never really swapped actively but still had a rather good access to new games via various friends.
I remember going to Sam Ash Music on 48th street in NYC and noticing they had almost all of the Roland Sample Libraries on display with their latest sampler I had just purchased. I went back on a Saturday with a stack of blank 3.5 disks to copy all of them and nobody stopped me :)
I was also a Commodore fan with a 64, then an Amiga. My first experience with hacking was watching the guy who worked at my local dealer using a custom program to 'hex edit' the executables and remove the copy protection. Good times.
Love all your stories, Ned! Amazing the conference call trick worked. Kids today have it soooo easy, at least with tech anyway (and not counting the Pandora’s box of other bad things from the internet.)
Myst was mind blowing and also never made any sense.
My "pirate" days were in the mid 90s. I lived in a small town. Dial up internet was a thing, but mostly in the cities. We had no local number to dial so if you wanted to connect you had to go long distance. The local PC shop set up a BBS system which was cool. There were a couple of lame BBS games and a message board and a file sharing tool. I remember posting a copy of "Descent" on there. It got removed promptly and they reached out to tell me that they could not host "illegal" software on their business BBS. So I did some research and made my own BBS. I talked my parents into another phone line and put the message out and my small BBS became a game trading mecca of sorts for about 15 of us living in the middle of nowhere. Of course downloading things at 14.4k sometimes took all night... Good times!
This article brought back great memories of high school days, getting together with a friend, bringing our 1541 floppy drives to each other's house so we could copy games faster. I didn't have access to a BBS, so the best sessions were when we got a visit from a local hacker who would give us disks and disks full of games and copy programs. It wasn't as weird as your situation though: the guy went to our school and we knew him.
When we were old enough to have part-time jobs, we would get a group of 3-4 friends and buy a new game. We would copy it, and then photocopy the manuals (my Dad would take them to work and copy them for. Remember when it costs 10 cents to make a photocopy?). Then a friend got a job on a night cleaning crew, and he would let us in to places he was cleaning and we would use their photocopiers. I feel kind of bad about that now...
I'm also blown away by the conference call trick!
My era was the early 2000s. So lots of burning CDs and DVDs, torrenting, key gens, massive wallets full of discs to share with friends.
The memory that jumped out at me the most while reflecting on this time is a little odd. There was a well known group that you could rely on for rips and their key gen programs always had the most amazing music! Like up-beat, chip tune, techno stuff. Hilarious, but made me so happy.
Your story so resonated with me, except my platform was an Apple ][+. There was one kid in our high school that had an abundance of the pirated games and we had almost the same story--going over to his house, not having anything to trade that he didn't already have, but trying to get in his good graces for the latest cracked games. These were all on Apple 5 1/4 floppy disks. I remember each of the games had a special load screen put in by the original person or team that originally cracked the game. Lots of colorful names and art work. This was around 1982 or 83.
Did you miss a hated copy-protection from the old days? Oh yes: Lenslok.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenslok
I live outside USA so things are / were bit different. In 80's we kids were moving around all the time and folks rarely had any idea where we were or what we were doing. When I was like 11 - 13 years old I met this dude that was 10+ years older than me. Can't really recall how we met the first time but he was into computers and I ended up spending a lot of time around his place playing, "programming" and chatting. We eventually became very good friends and had a lot of awesome memories (like the first analog modem call across the country and so on). Sadly we've lost contact nowadays. (As a parent I'd be quite alarmed if my kid said to me that he is going to spend some time with some 20+ guy :D ).
Anyways, good story! Permanently etched in my memory from those times is the sound of the modem, punching holes to floppy disks to make them 2-sided, ruthless gaming sessions where everything was allowed (including kicking on the shins and disconnecting the other player's joystick cable), warming toes on external PSU and so many others.
I never really swapped actively but still had a rather good access to new games via various friends.
A slightly different pirating story...
I remember going to Sam Ash Music on 48th street in NYC and noticing they had almost all of the Roland Sample Libraries on display with their latest sampler I had just purchased. I went back on a Saturday with a stack of blank 3.5 disks to copy all of them and nobody stopped me :)
I was also a Commodore fan with a 64, then an Amiga. My first experience with hacking was watching the guy who worked at my local dealer using a custom program to 'hex edit' the executables and remove the copy protection. Good times.
Love all your stories, Ned! Amazing the conference call trick worked. Kids today have it soooo easy, at least with tech anyway (and not counting the Pandora’s box of other bad things from the internet.)
Myst was mind blowing and also never made any sense.