The old warez cracking scene had an outsize impact on computer security. GRSecurity, Heartbleed vulnerability, most reverse engineering tools for security, etc. etc. etc.

There's so much history here, touching on all sorts of insanity including selling 0-day to the US government that was then used to apprehend high-level Al-Qaida personnel, random warez busts leading to people taking oversea jobs, etc. etc. etc.

If anyone still has old .NFO archives from 1990-2000, I'd be very interested in getting as many as possible.

It's so easy to bait me with this nostalgia. There is something mysterious and enjoyable about dialing-in or connecting to a server in the unknown. During those days, many things were not easily discoverable which added to the fun.

For a brief time, this extended to the early internet with IRC servers. I spent most of my early teenage years downloading warez, .wav music files, and trying not to be a n00b on #c while asking n00b questions

Now that I am an old man, I wonder what today's youth do that is equivalent to this fun nerdy culture? Maybe I can partake, LOL.

1990 to 1999, that would be exactly the development timeline of Celerity BBS.

Just looking at the revision history of Celerity 2.04 on Discmaster, wow, that went forever!

https://discmaster.textfiles.com/view/43430/BBS_Software/DOS...

Good ol' times :) Cheers to all the ex. Efnet and Underworld #warezgraphics, #warezart, #3dee, #3dwarez, #3dgfx, #warez3d fellas.

University of Tartu sysadmins used to point warez.ut.ee to 127.0.0.1 back in 1993 just to confuse warez-interested but ill-educated youth like myself.

I hope one day someone will make a movie about the warez scene. The only piece of media we have as far as I'm aware is The Scene (2004–2006) which I wholeheartedly recommend to anyone with a love for moving bytes around illegally.

It's quite interesting to see just how much of that historically proprietary and copywritten software from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s is thoroughly outcompeted today by FLOSS solutions that are simply available to anyone at no cost whatsoever. A very high fraction of the proprietary "utility" programs of old (with a huge amount of wasteful duplicated effort involved in their creation) are even made completely redundant by OS-level features in free operating systems. We live in the best era for "warez" of sorts, and it's all completely legal!

Such fond memories. So many OS reinstalls after inadvertently infecting my computer from a sketchy photoshop crack. You learn to never get too attached.

The NFO Search section is pure gold. I'm glad someone preserved all this.

From an archival perspective... it's sad to be able to search the filelists for software that's probably lost to history. For example, I've been trying to track down a (working) copy of SAS for DOS since forever. Even software from fly-by-night houses can tell us so much.

man, those were the days! I was a coder for an amiga crew in australia, we had a heap of bbs's going and we'd phreak calls to scene BBS's in europe, usa & eastern aus. Amazing what mischief we'd get up to with a usrobotics hst modem ha :D

hihi,

detailed list, of stuff i did, from 1992 to 1998 awesome, loveit.

found my name in 79 pages of nfo files

Those really were the good old days. My BBS ran out of my parents’ attic, with two phone lines and Renegade on the server (on a beefed-up PS/1). It was pure magic.

That's how I learned computer security, learned how IIS would allow specific commands, which paths Windows would not show, etc. Very interesting.

That's also, maybe more importantly, how I learned about information propagation and even epistemology because you HAD to 1st in order for your work to be valuable.

A lot of fun, of lot of learning still valuable decades later.

Warmly recommended!

I remember various people from that time pronouncing warez in two distinct ways.

wares ware-ez

I'm not sure which is the correct way.

#zeraw on DALnet in the 90s, those were the days..

Archive, archive, archive some more. Duplicate and make available to the public rather than hoard.

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