Hi I’m currently try to learn more about the history of piracy. I know that at some point I saved a very cool plain HTML website regarding that topic that was recommended here but I lost it :/ So now I hope you have cool sources. I’m only into the piracy since a couple of years so everything will be helpful.
warez and IRC is where I started. There used to be IRC channels you could go to and get links to warez sites for stuff or simply share directly via IRC downloading. The people who were in college/university with T1 lines were the kings of that stuff at the time as everyone else was lucky if they were even on a 56k dial-up connection. I pretty much pirated almost every Dreamcast game via IRC OR via forums where people would burn stuff to a disc for you and then physically mail the discs to your house. I had a buddy that was in college half way across the country that would do this. download a bunch of stuff via his T1 line, burn the stuff to a bunch of CD-Rs and then mail them to my house, I remember that’s how I got Windows 2000.
thats sounds so cool an in a way also very inconvenient
It started way before that.
People copying books and sheet music. If you’re talking electronic, then I have “pirated” reel to reel music copied from records from the 60’s.
If you’re talking computers, I have floppy discs copied and passed around from the 80’s.
BBS’s existed in the 70’s and were sharing stuff before IRC became popular.
Heck, if humans can technically make a copy of it, no matter how difficult, we will and freely share it.