What was software piracy like in the old days?

What was software piracy like in the old days?

I first started to pirate stuff in 2005 and even back then it was just copying the crack to the proper folder

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a garillion 1.44meg files.

Getting a copy of the copy protection page from manuals printed so it couldn't be photocopied
Old DRM was literally "what is the 6th word on line 4 of paragraph 5 on page 34?"

Just copy and paste senpai

Or you can just buy a blank tape and rent some VHS tapes then copy its contents

Actually bringing a cd burner with you to steal software from a public machine.

how old are you talking?

its been copy/paste the patch or run the keygen since the 90s

ftps and irc

I pirated my first ware in 2002. Downloaded Photoshop 7 from an IRC channel using a 56k modem. I remember it taking 16 hours.

Well heres my personal pirating history

BBS warez - bbs's would advertise having the earliest releases of warez, mostly games. The term "0-day" (now used to refer to hacks) originated this way. BBSs often had upload/download ratios so people would upload and pirate all kinds of interesting random shit
AOL - mass mails by warez groups. You would request a mass mail in a chat room and the group would forward you like 100 emails with tons of random warez. Forwarding it around by AOL email became a distribution channel.
(Fun fact- the word "phishing" was coined in this AOL scene.)
IRC - bots came about that would send you warez. You could navigate a menu with text commands either in-channel or by private msg. It would queue file transfers and stuff. Different channels would specialize in different content. Some probably still exist today.

We exchanged floppy disks on the playground. I once managed to get a copy of a LOTR game on a 10 disk box and spend 2 days copying them to another 10 disks that belonged to mt brother. He got mad for not asking him fist and deleted the whole thing. Biggest trauma of my childhood. The things got much better once CD/DVD hit us. You could get All-in-one shit for like $5. They had everything from OS/Utilities/Games but no much porn IIRC. Then the internet happened and the only thing that has change is the protocols and formats.

early 90's pirate here. shit was easy as fuck but equally slow. took 30 minutes to download a song. mp3 players back then could only hold like 12 songs, but it was amazing. it became faster in the mid-late 90s when dsl/cable became affordable. didn't give a fuck about privacy or getting caught because it was a non-issue back then. in general, it was a lot easier and there was more content available.

Limewire/napster IRC and newsgroups.

Was near impossible to download anything on dialup as a 100mb file took 8-9 hours and if you lost connection you were fucked. You ended up seeing a fuckton of small zip/rar files that you could gather to collect the whole file you were trying to get.

that's about it.

I was a teen In the 90s. There was lots of piracy on BBSs, then when th internet became widespread it was ftp sites and Usenet. Usually you'd get your sites on irc, but eventually people wrote bots were you could download directly from irc. Ama I guess. #warez666 on undernet was where the party was at.

>Was near impossible to download anything on dialup as a 100mb file took 8-9 hours and if you lost connection you were fucked.

mfw mom kept picking up the fuckin phone

>mp3 players in early 90's
haha no.

that would probably be more effective than whatever they do now

>What was software piracy like in the old days?
>piracy
gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.en.html

>grandpa thinks he is interesting because he showed up first
BBS and IRC are sperg containment nowadays thank god

open in ollydbg, write jump to skip check, patch

Mp3 wasnt invented til 1996 iirc

You would spend an hour archiving something to disk, but you had to sit there, because the archiver would prompt you to insert a new disk. If I remember correctly, the original Tomb Raider was about 35 floppy disks.

Then you'd take it to a friend's place and copy all the archives off the disk and extract it. Inevitably one file would've gotten corrupted, because the disks you were using were old disks from your or your friend's parents work that you'd scored after they had been run through a device that looks like a deli toaster with a giant magnet instead of an element, then thrown out.

>installer.exe
>the 6th word on line 4 of paragraph 5 on page 34.txt

Ikr. I would plug my sound card into the input on my tape recorder, and play them on my walkman.

kazaa lite

then bittorrent came along

Sitting in a private AOL chat room waiting for the right bot to spam what you want. You reply to the bot and get mailed a list of games, music, movies etc you want. You then go back to the chat room and put something like !botname item# send and you'll get 400 emails each with a zipped rar that when downloaded and combined give you what you wanted.

Think sitting on dialup for 4 days downloading a game and then finding out rar#200 is corrupt.

i slowly started going back to irc.
extremely simple now.
ex:
>sunxdcc
>linux_livedisk.iso
>click channel (it loads up your irc program and auto connects to proper network & channel)
>click pack #xx (copy & paste code into chatroom to request files)
>save
its been about 12 years since the last time i loaded up irc.
saved so much time trying to re-learn the commands.

you're both right. i'm bad with years, guess it was later than i thought. this was the mp3 player i'm talking about. it was like 300 bucks and could hold one entire album. i miss the little guy.

>2002
>dialup cuz family is poor
>kazaa!
>tmd-moviez.1o2.avi 150MB
>i forgot how but i set the computer to shutdown after 6am
literally would take 4 days of downloading @8hrs a night.

i remember in 2003 my friend showing off his mp3 player that was shaped like a cd player.
i loled because i was carrying around a cd player that played mp3s.
i looked even more autistic because the cd player had a clear cover....apparently the cd player didn't need to spin 24/7 like it does with a normal cd. it would spin only for the first few seconds of the mp3. after that it would stop spinning. this was during my "standup comedy days"
>be on the school bus
>listening to standup while holding my mp3/cd player on my lap
>giggle giggle giggle.
>people look at me and my non-spinning cd. (i-i-is he even listening to anything, that cd player is clearly off)

I pirated since 2008 I think. I started doing research of what my so called friends were using on their computer and that's where I find all the free shit. FREE FUCKING SHIT BRUH!!! God I love life.