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Saikyo

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Neat' date=' you copied games, posted copies on the BB? If you were the 'biggest pirate' on the East-coast, the police would be looking for you back then?[/quote']

 

You have to understand the way BBS's worked. When I started I was running a C=64 with several 1571 drives(3-4) linked together. I had 1 phone line dedicated to the BBS and the number changed about every other month. I also had a Public Domain fake front on my BBS. You would only get to the Pirate section if you were using a pre-approved password, it was'nt open to just anybody. It was really rare for a software company to catch onto someone. Most of the people I knew that were busted were caught by phone companies. Over 90% of the software originated in Europe and the phone codes were used to avoid paying Long Distance charges. Do you know how long it would take to download a program at 1200baud??

 

As I originally stated, "I was one of the biggest pirates on the East Coast".

Not the Biggest, there were a dozen or so people that I knew that were way over me. My BBS had what was called 0-1 Day Warez, meaning that I only posted the newest games, after they were out for a few days they were replaced. Towards the end, I even had people at various software companies that would give me pre-copy protected games that were weeks from being released. I think it's safe to talk about it now, the limitations ran out long ago. I was young and stupid and the format used made it very simple to do. When you are confronted at home by local and Federal Officers with a $17,000 phone bill you kind of decide that maybe it's not something that you want to continue doing. I had all my computer equipment confiscated, (including the desk and chair??). I did eventually get back most of my equipment but all of the software was destroyed.

 

So if you ever come home from School and there are several law enforcement cars in front of your house........... :)

 

An interesting piece of information, A lot of modern programmers on Gamecube, X-Box and PS2 started as C=64 Pirates/Coders.

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Yeah, I miss the c64 pirate board days. I never changed my number, never had more than one disk drive (message boards were overrated to us c64 types ;) ), mainly just put up arcade ports or people's requests.... but it was a lot of fun and shaped my career in a weird sort of way. Things started getting a little weird around '85 or 86 when I started making up codes to use on Sprint and MCI (no dial 1, you dialed a local access number, then a code, then a phone number) but by then I was on to bigger, better things as it were.

 

The only guy I ever knew who got busted was a kid who did a lot of carding. He worked at Caldor and stole carbons out of the trash, and his crowning achievement was the 20MB hard disk for his Commodore, which cost something like 800 bucks. He was the talk of the town till he got busted and disappeared, only to reappear 6 months later as a blatant "narc" as we called them despite none of us even knowing where to get drugs.

 

The BBS scene compared to the net was like farm life compared to NYC... that's the best comparison I can think of.

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I used to get on BBS's with my old 486 dx66. I only remember one of the names of the boards which was "Forgotton Realms" which had games and stuff I think. It was a long time ago, and that computer still sits in the same place with a corrupt hardrive and covered in dust.

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