1988

Cigarette and pot smoke filled the air. A loud collection of keyboard tapping and belching was heard throughout the room. A distinct smell of stale urine reeked in the air. Dozens of stale cans of pop and 7-11 drink cups littered about the dimly lit basement. Suddenly, a fist came down hard on the table, upsetting a drink and crunching a bag of chips into a potato explosion. "Fucking cocksucker!" he shouts. "Goddammit Jeff, you fucking ruined my chips!" a taller teen shouts. A crowd of young people, aged 10-30 were gathered in a basement in the Nort East of Winnipeg.

 A small crowd gathers around a young teenager who is sitting behind a Commodore 64 computer. "This goddamn game can't be copied. We have to use a nibbler" he said with confidence. A few agreed, but then after a few choice words about the shitty Epyx fastload cartridge, he decided to go ahead and use Nibbler-64. Turns out he was right, the game could be copied - as long as you had the special code wheel. No matter, his dad would photocopy it for him later today.

A few computers down, two young teenagers were copying files and talking about the games they are currently playing. A Quiet Riot song can be heard playing the distance. "Well, I'd have to say Bard's Tale 3 was definately not as good as #2" the bearded guy said. The skinny guy with glasses agreed. "I'm playing Wasteland and it's pretty awesome!".

That skinny kid was me. Back in the day, my friend Lord Stalker and Cameraman would get together to swap software. Sometimes we would find our own copying sessions and then get together and swap with whatever we didn't have.

Constantly checking the FutureShop flyer for 5 1/4 and 3.5 inch blank disk sales became an addiction. When someone tells you they have a few hundred DVD or CD's, no big deal right? How about a few thousand floppy disks ? That was the real struggle for young crackers/hackers/or generally anyone who wanted to use software but couldn't do it because they were broke as fuck. I stole a goddamn demo disk from Woolco back in the late 80's (Tapper was the game - not great btw).

Back then we'd buy a game, copy it, then return it the same day and claim we really didn't open it up, and thought it was a different game. Most of the time, those clueless idiots bought the story.

But the gravy eventually ended, game sellers would no longer accept returns. When you purchased a game in the 1980's, you really owned it for good. No returns, no gamestop, and only swapping with friends.

"You have to see this" the bearded dude said as he brought in a sleek, black box. It was the legendary Indus GT floppy disk drive. Fully compatible with the C64 and 400% faster than the old, shitty 1541 and 1541-2 floppy drives. This is ancient technology when compared to the solid state media that is availalble today. Back then, a 1MB upgrade to a computer would cost easily 500 - 1000 dollars.

(See this cool archive article for what it looked like in the 1980's)

https://archive.org/stream/run-magazine-20/Run_Issue_20_1985_Aug#page/n25/mode/2up