A swashbuckling tale of Italian software piracy – 1983-1993 (2022)

My wife said that in Eastern Europe in the 80s and early 90s it was common to go to a "record shop" and give a certain list of songs that the owner of the shop, who was just someone with access to some records, a record player and a cassette recorder, would copy to a cassette for a fee. This was the only way to get western music, and there were most certainly no copyright laws at all that would have regulated that.

Edit: I asked my wife for details and there was an actual shop offering this service, but they got their cassettes from another guy who was married to a stewardess. She brought CDs back from her trips abroad, and he made a business copying the CDs to cassettes and selling them. Eventually he got in trouble with an organized crime group who had learned that he was making good money and wanted a share of it. This was in the early 90s in Sofia/Bulgaria.

We had an Apple II club in Southern California in the early 80s that did the same thing. Couple dozen of us meeting once a month and sharing floppies. Multiple systems with 10 disk drives and using Penulticopy to make nine duplicates at a time. We all ended up with far more programs (mostly games) than we could ever use in our lifetime.

I eventually started a small dial-up BBS to trade warez amongst friends and play some multiplayer games, but stopped when the number got out and strangers started dialing in. Completely freaked me out and for the next few months thought the FBI was going to be knocking on my door.

I spent more on blank floppies during that era than legal software.

Me too. My dad would go to "the computer club" and bring back some diskettes.

Best part was, most of the games were hobbyist efforts so I'd get a true floppy (5 1/2") that held maybe 320kb? And each side would have like 10 or 15 games each.

There was a later period on PCs in the 386/486 era where you would buy a magazine and it'd come with a CD loaded with games - back when shareware was a perfect vessel for marketing games that were easily stolen - good enough to sate a broke kid but also led to many Xmas gift wishlist items. iD had so much street cred in my circle.

Ditto for the Atari user group meetings I attended here in Vancouver in the mid 80's.

Here in Southern California in the 80's and 90's we just called them "copy parties".

We'd even hold them at respectable places sometimes like a bank's conference room someone somehow managed to get access to. Everyone brought a little folding table, and their C64s, and later Amigas.

I was also part of some cracking groups, making intros for them - FBR, Agile, Intense, TSM, and some others. I was also involved in some warez BBSs, making customizations to the BBS code. We did all the phone phreaking stuff too.

And as a consequence of being too involved in some of these people's lives, I now have both an FBI and Secret Service file on me. I had no repercussions, but my friends sure did (for the phone related stuff). The stories I could tell...

It really was the golden age of warez.

Yeah I was that weird guy that had multiple 1541 floppy drives at club meetups... lol

Yeah, same for an Aussie Amiga group in '88 - wholesale piracy, everyone running XCOPY - looking through each other's disk-boxes and copying. I remember seeing ads in the local paper for software at $2 per disk, send SAE for free calalogue. The pirate scene for the Amiga back in those days was huge. We even had a local group that traded on an international scale, hooking everyone up with the big groups in Europe. Fun times for sure!

For me it was decades later that I finally realized that Mario and Luigi were not in fact cheap rip-offs of Giana and Maria and it was the other way round.

Literally every newspaper kiosk, convenience store, etc had racks of cassettes in half of mainland Europe (esp. Italy, Spain, Portugal) during the 80s and 90s. I use to relish trips to the mainland to stock up on the latest ZX Spectrum games.

Later on they were a good source for those pirated multi-game carts for consoles.

we probably went to the same shop. also same price! :D

Same in Portugal during this time period, it was almost impossible to buy actual legal software for 8 and 16 bit home computers.

Most shops would have floppies and tapes, with covers that were copied mostly B&W, or a bit more pricy for colour.

With luck you could get some printout copies of the manuals as well, or very least the "copy protection codes".

The dream of most kids during the 8 bit days was a doule deck tape recorder.

Hong Kong in 1998 had small stores with professional software piracy. "There are no software companies here" was the rumor.. all tech companies that had regular income and employees sold hardware. Any software development professionally was associated with a hardware company of some kind at that time there.

I once borrowed a Windows 95 CD from a fellow student. He had brought it from China. It looked totally legit, not at all home-burned with inkjet printed cover. A true original.

The only thing that gave it away was that in addition to Windows it had Doom on it.

I remember complaining to a friend a few years ago that my reverse-engineering and binary-patching skills were atrophied because there were so few Linux binaries which prompted users to enter a registration code to make them fully-functional.

Happily these days I still get to reverse things, and patch binaries, for my own amusement.