Obligatory Goldberg link since lots of people these days are still unaware that SteamWorks DRM is easily bypassed these days (you don’t even need to patch the files, you can just bypass it).
I made so much money in high school downloading MP3s or anime from Napster/Kazaa/Limewire and burning then to CD/DVD since I was, like, the only kid in town with a computer, access to the internet, and a DVD burner. I remember getting asked how my parents let me get away with it and I was like “my dad is the one who taught me how to do it!” He was always borrowing games or music from co-workers. He got the DVD burner to make copies, since DRM was basically non-existent at the time for a majority of games. S’how we had Quake!
If you don’t mind me asking, were you on dial up, DSL, or coax?
IIRC, we first got DSL when I was just leaving junior high. Or maybe when I was a sophomore. I really don’t remember when, but when I was doing most of this downloading, it was on DSL. When we still had dialup, I couldn’t even reliably play UO all weekend (first-world problems, AMR?), because we only had 1 phone line and someone would eventually need the phone.
Yeah, downloading on 56k was not fun. My average per song was 1 hour, which I thought was decent considering it was free. My house got an additional line just for internet.
We eventually got a coax modem, I was at high school at the time when we went high speed too. I felt like I was in the future. Lol.
What I missed was losing access to AOL sites though but now that I look back, those were kinda trash.
What does she mean there was a “generational shift” that led to people burning CDs? Back in the floppy disk days, everyone was copying floppies—I remember when my grandfather bought a Mac to use at home, and immediately his friends at work loaded him up with copied disks. Which generation is she thinking of that wasn’t pirating a ton of software?
Generational shift means kids bad and stupid. That’s all.
A tip for millenials: Whenever you cringe at zoomers for their dumb tiktok dances, remember the badger song and realise every generation is stupid and cringe.
I’ve never heard of any badger song.
That’s so funny that millennials cringe at zoomers, because I have always found millennials to be infinitely more cringe than zoomers have ever been.
Badger?
It predates YouTube and would loop forever.
I had a friend back in the early 2000’s who did this.
He paid for this way through school by abusing the schools T1 access and pirated shitloads of movies and would dump them all to DVD-Rs and then sell them on ebay. He wouldn’t make exact DVD rips, he instead would fill the DVD with tons of different movies or shows and sell them as collections. He did especially well with anime, which was difficult to access in the US at the time.
He later went on to be an electrical engineer at Boeing.
I also remember people hating Valve at first for this DRM scheme, and it’s also weird that people forgot that Steam itself is a minimally invasive form of DRM.
Back then everyone had enough sense to hate all DRM.
Now they’ll complain that Linux sucks because it can’t play the harry potter game
