Floppy Disk Piracy: How Software Was Shared Before the Internet

My grandmother, an indie educational software dev, bought and brought home to me a collection of 300 floppy disks from Goodwill in 1987, that turned out to be someone’s complete warez collection; each disk had a boot-up index with up to 25 items each, and each program had a crack splash screen. It single-handedly propelled me into a thirty year computing career in a field that academic colleges still don’t teach today. Our family was able to afford two shareware payments in my entire childhood — one was for {COMMO}, from which I learned TUI and Expect scripting — so that 300-disk collection of pirated programs ended up costing the developers nothing, because I never could have afforded them to begin with.

This doesn’t excuse people pirating software when their spending allocations could be reasonably adjusted to afford it, but my family was ‘has a map of local fruit trees and standing agreements with their owners to swap canned fruit for fresh fruit and empty jars from theirs’ so it’s a miracle we ever got ahold of a computer at all. Piracy for piracy’s sake still does get on my nerves as an adult, but I still use it to this day for infrequent (three times in seven years, totaling one hour open time) usage of an industrial program for personal-hobby use that’s only offered at $3000/year subscription pricing. If I went pro, I’d pay for it, just like I did for Photoshop. But that’s an unattainable price for this non-comm, so their lost revenue from my bypass is $0.