'90s Hong Kong! Anyone remember that warez market in Mongkok?
'90s Hong Kong! Anyone remember that warez market in Mongkok?
When I went in 1992, it was crazy. CDs didn't have much adoption for computers by then, so the market was still floppies - IIRC HK$10 per disk and another HK$10 for a photocopied manual. They'd take your money and phone up some guy and tell them the four digit code and 10 minutes later someone would hand you a stack of disks. It felt weird that it was so blatant, but the first time I went by myself, I couldn't find it and asked a policeman for directions. He said in English, "Oh, the copied stuff? Over there!" and pointed to it!
That said, I only ever bought 3 disks from there - partly because I didn't have much money, but mostly because I found the programming books downstairs even more interesting. They were translations of all the English programming books, for about HK$30 each. The text may have been all Chinese, but the source code wasn't, so I bought a couple of books just for the diagrams and the source code.