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Comment by blorenz | Hacker News Reader

My first exposure to TP was when I pirated it off a warez BBS in the winter of 93 at the age of 14. The raw power I felt when I compiled my own EXE in contrast to running just a .BAS file was enthralling! I started modding Renegade BBS and writing door programs. I tried to, unsuccessfully, create worms, Trojans and viruses. It changed my life and set me on a course for where I am in tech today. Moreover I’m reformed my deviant teenage tendencies. I owe Borland a lot.

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That throws me back. Being a teenager without any real understanding of compilers, interpreters etc., being able to create my own EXE file in TP4 felt like having superpowers - like being a real(TM) programmer :)

A few years later at 16, I actually got paid for developing a small app for managing my dad's customers, paid by the company he worked for. Part of that money went into getting a legal version of TP6.

Good times :)

Ah, the good old BBS days. I wrote a door library for Turbo Pascal back in '89 when I was 17 after I learned how to write an interrupt based serial driver, and then released it as shareware. It saw quite a bit of use until the mid-90's when the BBS scene fell off a cliff.

Inquiring minds need to know: what is a door library?

I think doors in BBS terms were essentially side-loaded programs that ran within the BBS framework. Different content, text games, that sort of thing. So the library would be something written to work within that specific BBS software.

TIL. Thank you.

I had a similar experience in the same era. In addition to the deviant stuff I also used it to tinker with graphics programming using inline assembly for the “performance critical” (for a 386SX) parts. That experience definitely laid the foundation for what I do today.

"I owe Borland a lot."

A belated license to be exact :P

I pirated Turbo Pascal back in the day because I was a poor student in a Third World country and there was no way I could afford it. Ditto Turbo C.

After I started working, I had a hand in selecting Borland C++ as our in-house development platform, and we paid Borland a fortune in licensing fees. Which would have gone to Intel or another company if it were not for my, and other folks in my cohort's experience with pirated Borland products as students.

There is a lesson in there, somewhere.

The lesson is that piracy (and to an only slightly lesser extent, free student licences) was an extremely powerful tool to keep a tool market cornered: impossible to compete on price when piracy is so ubiquitous that payment is essentially opt-in.

(I had a mouse driver disc, 5.25, that wasn't pirated, it felt like something from a parallel universe with its machine-printed label)

A deliberate strategy by some companies. (Microsoft comes to mind.(

I really wonder when all this changed. I seem to have this idea, that I share with many others that software houses back in the day explicitly didn't care much about piracy because it got people hooked on their software and in the end enterprise would foot the bill.

I'm not sure how true this was, as I've yet to see any real official sources speaking about this myself but it seems like it was like that. But most of my thoughts about this comes from being in the piracy space back in the days so I really have no idea if this was ever a real thing or not.

I was joking. I think IP laws are broken anyway, so I really dont care.

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