The great Warez Wars of the 90's

I might end up sounding like a total geek here but I am curious about some thing. In the early days of the internet I was always on AOL. I used to be part of Warez/hacker groups that lived just to find security holes in AOL. I am proud to say I was actually the original creator of the 1 IM Punter, which eventually was the death of this activity.

My question is, are any others here in SL the product of this era and group of people? I actualy have met a few in world that I knew from those days and it was kind of funny sharing stories of those old days.

If you have no clue what I'm talking about, believe me it is nothing exciting or anything I am proud to share with you

Beau, I was never an AOLr, but I sure remember the good ol' days!

The great warez wars I remember took place in the mid to late 80's and into the early 90's, before the WWW, before there were games for IBM Pc's, when BBSs ruled, and Apples and Amigas were kings (or queens).

There were cracking groups such as The Humble Guys, INC (International Network of Crackers), Razor, and many others, which were in hardcore competition to release warez before any other group.

These groups had a full network of people involved, from the software crackers themselves, to BBS operators, to the couriers, whose sole job was to upload warez to as many pirate BBSs around the world as possible, usually at considerable expense (remember, those were the days of 300-2400 bps modems and dialup).

The following are couple of great sites to give you a taste on the BBS subculture of the 80's:

http://www.textfiles.com/piracy/

http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/

Cheers,

- T -

Sysop
"El Infierno BBS"

Tito, I remember those days! That was also when cracking software was done using simple Hex editors in a lot of cases.

I ran a BBS for Commadore computers and had a jillion Warez-cracked games for the C=64, 128 and Amiga. God we used to have fun. BBS parties with all of us geeks getting drunk (along with some suprisingly HOT women). People hacking into each other's boards and playing tricks. Message board wars, MUDs, 300, 1200 and 2400 baud modems.

Anyone remember Quantum link (called Q-Link for short) that was the forerunner of AOL. In fact it became AOL in later years, but was originally only for Commodore 64s and 128s. I actually met my wife on there way, way back.

I still have my Amiga 2000HD and a ton of games, some of them still very fun to play and very nice looking graphically. The Bitmap Brothers produced ones in particular.

Ah the good old days. Get a call, grab the c-64 and the drive. toss your 500 double sided diskets of warez into the car and look for the house with the jolly roger flying.
I misss those hack parties they were great fun. I ran a bbs too and then found the net.
My favorite pre world wide wait app was archie. It would search all the ftp sites in the world. Found alot of cool warez that way. Get them down loaded before the admin logged in the morning and deleted them.

Pines for the sound of a 1541 drive hammering it's way through the copy protection on a Electronic Arts disk.

Rox

Heh I knew Amiga people would be in SL. It was by far my favorite computer.

Remember the programs.. Deluxe Paint 4, Imagine, Shoot Em Up Contruction Kit, Deluxe Music Contruction Kit, Pinball Construction Kit...
The Video Toaster??? So ahead of it's time.

I also did the whole BBS thing for many years. Lurking the message boards and playing games like Food Fight and Drug Wars.. downloading warez, using phreaking programs so I can call Canada for free and get more warez..

Yes I was on Quantum Link as well on my Commodore with a 300 baud modem. I used to download a ton of SID music. Mostly by one person who went by DrJ5 I think. This person was a genius transcribing the popular songs of the day into SID music. I forgot the name of the music editing program used, but you had to buy a fat book and type it all in yourself in order to use it (which I did). The Sidplayer was just awesome too. It had cool funky sprite animations and most of the time, the transcribers included the lyrics to the songs as well which would scroll along to the music. Truly talented people who would translate songs from Guns & Roses or Metallica, for example, by ear and do the whole songs within a few hours.

Most Apple Pirate BBSs used to carry tons of Amiga Warez and I remember there were programs available to play SID music on the Apple.

I remember all Appleheads were waiting for the Apple IIGS to come out, as it was supposed to be as good as or better than the Amiga. That reallly never became a reality.

After the dissapointment of the IIGS, I saw many people having to make a choice between the Mac and IBM (PC) compatibles. That was pretty much the beginning of the end for the Apple II series.

- T -

When I was in high school, I worked for AOL as a remote support helper (I worked in Tech Live, and we had names that began with TLA - mine was TLA NIN after nine inch nails ) . It was cool at the time because AOL was still charging by the hour and I got a free account in return for helping.

I actually became quite good friends with a notorious AOL hacker named Happy Hardc0re. A nice side benefit of that friendship, aside from him not hacking my account, was that he was able to hook me up with any piece of software I wanted at the time. It amazed me how much stuff was traded using AOL's email. You would receive these massive emails with 16 meg attachments or something, split into like 40 parts lol. I think it is how I originally got the beta of Windows 95, among other things. He also managed to find me things like 3D Studio, Painter, and other tools that started me down the path I am on now in my career. (I actually paid for a copy of Maya, I have come a long way ) Wow, good times. Your thread definitely brings back memories.

Oh the memories. I remember the best BBS was one that was in Santa Cruz called XBBS. The host wrote the software himself and it had a tree-like thread system somewhat similar to how slashdot handles its boards. This was basically unheard of back then. It was a pure discussion based BBS. No warez or files or anything. It was a pure message board. The topics were mature, civil, and thought provoking which was a rare feat back then. This was the first and only time I ever went to a gathering with online people. Went to the host's house in the Santa Cruz mountains with my brother and ended up playing poker with pennies with everyone.

The things that little C=64 could do with no Hard Drive..and a tiny bit of onboard memory. I used to have 3 drives on mine, two 1541s and hmm..what was the 3.5 one called. 1851 or something. I'd have 3-4 games on 5.25 and about 6-10 on the 3.5 for folks to download from my BBS, The Rising Moon.

And the Amiga was so fantastic. It's crisp sound and wonderful graphics built right in. And yes, I remember the Pinball Construction kit well..but I never did play with the Shoot Em Up Contruction kit much. Some of my faves were the original Populous, Gods, Speedball, Pirates...hmm..lots of others. And the CrackerJax program so you could just go rent the games and crack them. Finally threw my C=64 away, but can't seem to part with my Amiga..yet...

Commodore computers elicit almost as passionate of a response as Macs do, and rightfully so. My first computer was a C-64, and then a C-128. Both fueled my passion for games - some of the best gaming experiences I had were on my lowly C-64. For my C-128, I had one of the first integrated office suites, called Jane, that had a word processor in it that I would use to write stories to entertain myself and my friends. It definitely was a tool that shaped my exploration of writing.

When the Amiga came out, I wanted one so badly. When I found out that it had 4096(!) colors, I felt like a dream had come true. It was such a magical computer to own - I loved owning one and was very sad that things evolved the way they did, though I feel pretty damn passionately about this blazingly fast wide screen HP laptop I am posting this on too, so things did work out. I will always remember the Commodore computers with great fondness.

I ran a BBS back on a C-64 in the late 80's -- spent most of the 90's inside Devpac 2 and 3 for the Amiga.. coming up occasionally to play in Dpaint III / 4.

I wasted a good part of that decade taking copy protection off Amiga games and writing Demos.

All I can say is 'mmmmmmmm copperlists'

I had more fun programming then than I've ever had since -- I used to have a computer running Amithlon just so I could reminice -- although I think the time has passed and I haven't ever recaptured the joy that I had back then.

Siggy.

For you Commodore Lovers...

Just heard it on the radio, a Japanese company just purchased the Commodore trademark, so expect Commodore to make a comeback on one way or another...

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,119093,00.asp

- T -

For you C=64 nostalgia junkies, I sell a C=64 replica on my property (and SLExchange) for 60 L$. That's just my little in-forum ad for those who give a damn.

I too had a plethora of Commodore products (even the C=16 p.o.s., the Plus 4 and a few others whose names escape me because I sold or gave 'em away long ago). I still have my C64 and tons o' software though.

I remember the whole warez scene. I can still remember the tail end of my years back east when I'd go over to my buddy's house to see his pimping new 386 (his first non commodore) and use this weird program called "Mozilla". He told me he'd never go to another BBS again now that he discovered that internet thing. Me being the forward thinking guy that I am, I blinked and barely gave it a second though. Turns out he mighta been on to something...

I had many years on my Amiga 500 (pimped out with the additional 512K and the 20MB hard drive eventually), playing Psygnosis games and generally doing tons of stupid-ass things to tinker in the computer. I swear the coolest thing about the Amiga, to me, was that I'd actually have an 80-column display (1084S, baby!), as opposed to my BBS'in in 40-column C64 mode.

Countless hours of Trade Wars every night ensured that I didn't pass any class that was during first period... Those were the days.

BTW, David, you were very close. It was the 1581.

I used to swipe compuserve IDs on my vic-20, ~1982 (I was 14 and very horny and very ugly, those are my 3 excuses). Back then, Compuserve was a pay by the minute thing, and it wasn't cheap (25 cents a minute?)......I'd go to a one on one chat room (as a girl, of course) and after talking for a few moments with somebody, I'd type very quickly:

#)$*(349342#$()@$*)@#$

which looked like modem noise.

Then I'd type "Enter Username:" and "Enter Password:"

after they did, I'd wait about 10 seconds and go "what the hell? did you have to enter your password?" and they'd say "yes, you?"...then we'd chat a few more minutes, and I'd use their ID to log on to play the text games on there for the month till they got they're bill.

I'm not proud of that, but I hadn't even thought about it for years until this thread came up. On the plus side, I'm pretty sure I'm going to hell for that, which means I can do whatever I like this weekend with no further reprucussions.

T. Rubio

p.s. Dont' get me started on the war dialers and the sprint code generators!

Hahaha, Cristiano is admitting to pirating software! Gah, somebody check the sky to see if it's falling

Taco... How devious.

Yes, I too partook of the C-64 warez. My uncle gave me his old Commodore when he got his awesome brand-new XT personal computer! ... Add a 1660 300 baud modem, and it was magic.

A lot of the local BBS's here would verify that a new user was a real person by voice validation. Boy, were my parents freaked out the first time I (at about 13 years old) got a phone call from some older man they'd never met. Everyone in the house soon got used to the high pitched squeal anytime they tried to use the phone.

I was a product of the early 90's myself. I did have a Tandy Color Computer 3 that had a cassette tape backup when I was younger, but it never connected to anything.

I remember all the local BBS's , mostly 1 line boards that had the 1.44 meg warez files and the message boards running software like wildcat and renegade. I actually ran a Renegade BBS for a while. I would use a hex editor to change the paths so I could modify the ansi/ascii further.

The first time I got on the internet was when it was all text based. I remember using Winsock to logon and them offering SLIP at one point .. I'd mostly hang in IRC and remember how much of a blast it was to try to overtake channels through netsplits. Had a few channels I'd hangout in and put my eggdrop bot as an operator. Damn those were the days. LOL I'm only 26 so I'm sure I missed out on the earlier days. My first modem was a 2400 and that was decent for the time. I know some of you out there used 300 baud or less. Remember Ymodem and Xmodem? LOL Kermit?

I used Windows 3.1 at the time, but still couldn't get over my love for DOS lol .. It took a while to catch on to the copy and paste deal.

I had an amiga at one point. had 386 and 486 IBM based PCs as well... then the p75 and so on.

There used to be a great old-skool bbs trivia event in-world