[jortis]

I too remember those years very well (from '83 onwards, when I managed to get a Sinclair ZX Spectrum as a gift). Magazines were very common at newsstands, but even in regular specialized stores, most of the games were pirated. I still have the instruction manual in Italian (completely counterfeit) for the game ELITE on the ZX Spectrum. The same happened when I bought a Commodore 128 three years later, and again a couple of years after that when I got an Amiga 500. You only had to go to the shop where you bought the computer to purchase games or other software. I still remember Deluxe Paint and a C compiler—if I’m not mistaken, it was Lattice C.

And shall we talk about the common practice of pirating DOS or Windows? Starting from Windows 95 onwards... Truly a different world. The illegality in that field was scandalous for entire decades... (and even now, in many professional offices, it's still common practice to use cracked copies of Adobe Acrobat...).

[weinzierl]

I once borrowed a Windows 95 CD from a fellow student. He had brought it from China. It looked totally legit, not at all home-burned with inkjet printed cover. A true original.

The only thing that gave it away was that in addition to Windows it had Doom on it.

[stevekemp]

I remember complaining to a friend a few years ago that my reverse-engineering and binary-patching skills were atrophied because there were so few Linux binaries which prompted users to enter a registration code to make them fully-functional.

Happily these days I still get to reverse things, and patch binaries, for my own amusement.