[jenmcewen]

"China has a... quite healthy attitude towards copyright and trade secrets. That is, they don't give a flying fuck here."

haha, I used to live in Dongguan.. Well, actually, Changping Town, Dongguan. It was impossible to get software that wasn't pirated.

[TeMPOraL]

When I was a kid you could hardly get any legal software in Poland too, and whatever there was available legally, was priced beyond reach of a simple low-to-middle-class family. Quite honestly, I owe my entire career to software piracy. Now that I work and earn money I buy everything I need legally if it's available, but I still support policies and technologies that give cheap or free access to tools, knowledge and culture to youth. Fortunately the current situation in IT is much better now, thanks to the Internet and companies realizing they can get more paying customers later if they give personal-use licenses for free.

[klibertp]

> When I was a kid you could hardly get any legal software in Poland too

True. Poland market was so small (and so far away, relatively - that was before fast Internet connections) that no one gave a "flying fuck" what was happening here. I remember buying pirated CDs in broad daylight at the mall circa '95, no one cared. A few years later I wanted to buy Visual C++ 6.0 (standard edition) and it took me half a year to finally get it - nobody had it for sale at all. You theoretically could buy software abroad, but then it was so expensive no one really did this. The only software distribution platform was sneakernet.

[TeMPOraL]

Yeah. I was buying games on CDs in a particular market in my city around '97. Also VC++ 6.0 was my first real programming environment; I got it from a friend of my dad, I have no clue where he did find it, but it was what turned me into a programmer. I still have fond memories towards that environment.

Actually, I was on the phone with Microsoft once, applying for internship. I was asked what is my favourite dev software; I answered something along the way of "VS C++ 6.0, because the 200x editions kind of suck", just little more politely. I didn't get the internship eventually, but I want to believe this was for unrelated reasons.

[foobarian]

You guys had CDs? I was buying software on floppies by mail order from my friendly neighborhood pirate. My favorite thing about it was that whenever I ordered a program or two, he would include a bunch of other programs and games for free to fill the extra room on the floppies, since the floppies were the expensive part and it didn't cost him any extra. It was like getting a box of chocolates. Ah those were the days.

[TeMPOraL]

In late 90s/early 2000s (around 1997-2005) the standard practice was to go to a specific marketplace in the city to get games and software for $6 - $7 (around 25 PLN); this was a standard price for a CD of anything, the content didn't really matter. I was a kid at that time, so I don't remember how it was before. Maybe we had a floppy market as well; someone older would have to chime in.