Warez BBS — a glimpse of the digital underground
As a child growing up in the early '80s, I was captivated by the Cambrian explosion of home computer options unfolding around me. Nearly every middle-class home I visited seemed to have a different, mutually incompatible desktop computer platform, each with its exclusive software ecosystem. When the grown-ups wanted to chat without kids underfoot, we’d be sent off to amuse ourselves in the computer room—but trading, swapping, or exchanging programs was never on the agenda for the fundamental reason that the floppy diskettes one machine's games were on simply wouldn't fit in the cartridge slot or cassette deck of a different manufacturer's incompatible machine. And even if we could somehow overcome the storage media's physical form factor, we’d have quickly discovered that, say, a Macintosh didn’t “speak” Amiga. Cybercrime wasn’t an option — at least not yet. So I was stuck endlessly playing the notoriously difficult Radio Shack’s Madness and the Minotaur on our family’s Tandy Colour Computer 2, or else typing in the most competitive BASIC game I could find and saving it to tape.
Ten years down the line, the home computing landscape looked very different. The MS-DOS-based PC architecture had eventually won that war of attrition, despite Commodore, Atari and Apple putting up one heck of a fight. By the early '90s, if I owned a game (usually a birthday or Christmas gift—games were pricey, and as a snot-nosed kid, I had no income, so ... hopefully it wasn't a lemon!) and I was done with it (this worked for Sierra On-Line's King's Quest 4, though is anyone ever really "done" with Sid Meier's Civilization?), I could trade it to a friend in exchange for second-hand access to one of his games.
Baby steps into a life of crime here — not copying the game per se, just passing along its disks and necessary supporting materials (manuals, etc., for those inevitable copy protection checks) from person to person. But this arrangement came with a few assumptions: you had to have something they wanted, they had to have something you want, and you had to live close enough to swap in person (something else kids don't do is drive, though bicycles and public transit made for interesting extensions to the sneakernet). Eventually, my chums and I formed an informal video game club, pooling our collective pocket change to buy games we most wanted. The biggest donor getting first crack at the game, and so on down the line. But all things considered, these were just small patches on a system oddly intended to sell video games to kids who couldn't afford to buy them.
Learning about the existence of, and gaining access to, a modem changed all of this. As long as the phone lines were free (and no parent picked up the receiver mid-transfer), you could dial into a Bulletin Board System (BBS) and avail yourself of all the content hosted there — what a concept!
The first BBS systems appeared in the late 1970s, allowing early home computers and their users to communicate remotely via modem connections over phone lines. Some BBSes —such as Toronto's Canada Remote Systems (operational from 1979) and BC's Mind Link! (circa 1987)—grew into large commercial online services operations, operating from server rooms full of computers and multiple phone lines. However, the vast majority were single-line affairs run by hobbyists on their home computers, allowing only one user to connect at a time. Most of these BBSes were public-facing forums where little, if anything, illegal occurred. They were cherished hobbyist hubs where shareware and "public domain" files were freely circulated, and their hosts wouldn't want to do anything to jeopardize their reputations as upstanding citizens of cyberspace or risk seizure of their hard-earned electronics.
Although these BBSs offered some good games—like Gary Martin's TradeWars 2002, Dustin Nulf's Operation Overkill II, Sir-tech Software's Usurper, James R. Berry's The Pit, and Seth Robinson's LORD—in reality, most of the games offered for free or on a shareware trial basis were typically underwhelming. They were outlets for exercises that otherwise would have failed upon launch in the conventional commercial marketplace. Still, we all suspected—felt in our bones—that somewhere out there, some pirate had run PKZIP on a commercial game they had installed on their hard drive and uploaded it to a "warez" BBS. We knew this because the respectable proprietors of public domain BBSes—whose numbers were circulated in printed periodicals, available at computer shops and from kiosks at bus stops—explicitly prohibited such activity on their systems. They didn't want any trouble, and frankly, neither did we. But it was tempting to think that circulating copies of games no longer sold, made by companies that were no longer in business, might be a victimless crime. That philosophical argument, however, was moot because my cadre of online friends had no laboratory in which to conduct these experiments into cybercrime. Still, wouldn't it have been fascinating to get a glimpse of the other side?
And indeed, not all BBS communities fit the characterisation outlined above. Users of anarchist, libertarian and post-modernist inclinations were interested in pushing the boundaries of discourse and exchange in cyberspace. Curious and contrarian hackers, along with transgressive online youth, sought forbidden knowledge and virtual outlets free from the onerous regulations of the real world and their rigid and bureaucratic intrusions into the virtual sphere. Thus, alongside the “public domain” BBS scene, a parallel “underground” BBS community emerged. Its boards came in many flavours. Some of them offered metered exchange of pirated game software (or "warez"), while others dealt with pornographic images (and stories). Some BBSs that offered tfiles (short for text files)—plain raw text documents formatted for 80-column dot-matrix printing—that contained forbidden cybercrime knowledge in the h/p/v/a/c realms of, respectively, hacking, phreaking (misuse of telephony infrastructure), computer viruses, "anarchy" (of the William Powell's "The Anarchist Cookbook" variety) and cracking (the gentle art of disabling copy protection on commercial software). Some boards focused on one of these domains; others dabbled in all of them under the broad, defiant banner of “free speech”.