Growing up pirating Apple2 software
By Philip Steinman
For Christmas of 1981 my family bought me the Apple ][+ Family
System. I was in the 9th grade at the time. Some of my friends had
Apples and others had Atari 800s. I used Apple Writer I to type all
my reports and even some homework on my computer. This justified the
cost of the computer to my parents, who were as amazed as I was, that
you could reedit papers saved on floppy disks and then print them out
perfect. But the real fun and beginning point of my knowledge of
computers started with games.
After a friend of mine said that he couldn't copy Wizardry I for me
because it had some sort of copy protection scheme I saved up and
bought it next summer. My parents certainly were not going to buy me
any games for a computer that was supposed to be used for school
work. Wizardy I was a blast and I wasn't going to wait until next
summer until I could afford more software. So me and my friends
starting trading games. We got Copy][+ and other utilities to help
spread around some copies amongst ourselves.
I never "cracked" any games myself, but when I came across them
I
quickly helped spread them. Playing these games never managed to
solve my chemistry problems but I became computer savy. I never sold
any programs or copies of software I had. Looking back on it I was
never a pirate, but a bootlegger. This is sort of my same feeling
toward recording music DATs of bands I see in concert. I will trade
DATs of concert recordings but I would never sell them or trade them
to someone I knew who was going to sell them. If you like the
artist, you'll buy the perfect studio CD recording. So DAT bootlegs
help spread the music around.
I don't make a parallel correlation to bootlegging software today,
but there are similarities. Someone might bootleg a copy of their
friend's or relative's software program that they never intended to
buy. This represents a net loss of $0 to.. say Microsoft. But if
they happen to start to enjoy the program and get some use out of it,
maybe they'll buy it for the manual, or maybe they'll buy the next
generation of it when and if it's released because now they think
it's worth it. Computer's and software, unlike music, are
technologically challenging to learn how to use, enjoy and benefit
from. In all the years I had my Apple ][+ my mom never used it and my
dad only used it (with my help) a few times. And this was not
because I was always playing games on it, but because they weren't.
If they got hooked on a few computer games then they would see how
rewarding and fun a computer could be. My dad finally had to get a pc
computer for work in 1989, but now he loves computers. Hacking
through Apple2 games through high school and college made me more
than computer literate. At USC I was in the first flim editing class
to use Avid Media Composer on a Macintosh IIfx to edit a student
film. Today, as a film editor using a computer daily, I owe a debt
of thanks to my days with Apple2 games, which I still enjoy from time
to time.
If you'd like to bootleg a scene of the movie I'm now working on
see.. http://www.thehouse.org/~philipms/mov/index.html
Philip