Disk Drive

Pirating. People talk about pirating as if it only became commonplace in the last 10 years or so. Obviously, this talk mainly revolves around the downloading of movies, music, TV shows and so on via the internet.

Well, i've got news for you. I was a computer pirate over 25 years ago. My plunder was games, more specifically software for the C64.

When we first got our Commodore, it didn't come with a disk drive or cassette drive. The Vic20, which preceded the C64, came with a tape drive. You would insert a regular old cassette tape and either upload or download software. Obviously a cassette player couldn't hold that much in terms of memory so the programs were pretty small.

Our C64 was a Christmas gift to the family from my parents. Initially, all we had for software were 2 cartridge games: Tooth Patrol & i *think* Sea Wolf. Tooth Patrol was pretty good. The problem was that while i was interested in learning some programming, we had no means to store it. The C64 had no writable internal memory once it was switched off. My dad ended up picking up a disk drive within the year. It wasn't cheap (i seem to recall a price of 400 or 500 bucks) but it made a HUGE difference in the usefullness of the computer. Suddenly we could create little programs and store them on big floppy discs (which literally were floppy back then in the 5 1/4 format).

This of course led to the quest for more games. Memory eludes me now, but i recall when a friend from school lent me a copying program that could copy almost all cracked programs from the original disc into the computer, then back out onto a blank disc. This was a revelation because it meant that you could trade games with your friends. There were also cracking programs out there - ones that could hack into store bought game software - but i never obtained one of these, or at least not one that actually worked. Most cracked games would have a little tag screen that tooted the horn of the clever fellow that had cracked the program.

All of this meant that there was a network of kids & adults out there passing pirated software off to one and other. The main difference between then & now was that this pirating was primarily done face to face, rather than over a modem. A kid in your biology class would tell you that he had a copy of Jumpman Jr or Bruce Lee and would lend it to you if you lent him something in return. No one really felt bad about this or thought of it as pirating because the price of games was so ridiculously high that no regular high school kid would have ever been able to buy one. Case in point: my brother & i saved up and bought Star Wars on cartridge for 50 bucks American. More on that at a later date.

We ended up amassing dozens of discs full of games. Then the revelation occurred. More on that next time.

(I realize that i've probably spelled disc as disk or disc throughout this, but figured none of you would notice).