My personal project to archive all of my old C64 diskettes into D64 disk images continues, slowly. It’s taking forever for the same reason it takes me forever to clean a room. “I’m off to clean the garage!” I’ll declare, with every intention of doing so. Ten minutes later when Susan sticks her head out to see if I need any help, I’m liable to be playing with old Star Wars toys, performing a puppet show, dancing around with a clown wig on my head, or sadly, some combination of the above. As I dig through my old computer disks, curiosity gets the better of me and I find myself rummaging through digital treats twenty years old.<\/p>\n

One such nugget I found is a digital letter from a guy named “Metallica”, written to me (“Jack Flack”), talking about a third fellow named “Evil Dead”. Right now you probably don’t think that’s funny at all. After reading this entire post, if you make it, maybe you will.<\/p>\n

Just to get everybody up to speed — prior to the Internet as we know it, some of us “early adopters” talked to each other online using modems and traditional phone lines connected to Bulletin Board Systems, or BBSes. Through these BBSes we talked, played online games, and swapped software — mostly games. Most of these games were copyrighted and therefore illegal, but we swapped them anyway. For expedientcy’s sake, let’s say it was the “P2P” of our day. (The technology involved was actually nothing like P2P, but the concept is close enough for this particular story’s sake.)<\/p>\n

These programs and games were called warez — short for software, and pronounced the same (“where’s”, not “where-Ez” or “Juarez”) — and there was a huge warez “scene”. Back in my Commodore days, I was a founding member of the OK Krackers and participated in the local warez scene. Now, there were many hierarchies in the warez scene. Big national (and international) groups like Fairlight and EagleSoft Incorporated (ESI) often got games the day they were released in stores, “cracked” them (removeed any copy protection schemes) and released them. Some of these groups had connections so good and worked so quickly that they often released cracked versions of games the same day they arrived in stores (or occasionally, even before they hit store shelves!). <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The OK Krackers were not a national cracking group.<\/p>\n

Now, due to the technology of the day — analog phone lines — all these warez got moved across the country at blindingly-SLOW speeds. Eventually the C64 got modems running at 2400 baud, but in the early days people were calling each other and transferring files at 300 and 1200 baud. Even though games were only a fraction of the size they are today, it could still take multiple hours to transfer a single game over the phone lines. This created a logistical problem for couriers (people who moved games from one BBS to the next; think of them as the “drug mules” of the warez world) — long distance phone bills. Some people paid them, others found ways around paying them. Couriers volunteered their hardware, money and time in exchange to be the first to get copies of programs and to be part of the warez scene.<\/p>\n

The OK Krackers were not couriers, either.<\/p>\n

Then there were also trainers (people who added “cheat functionality” to games) and video fixers (people who reprogrammed PAL\/European games to work on US\/NTSC computers and vice versa). The OK Krackers did neither of those things.<\/p>\n

Way, way down at the bottom of the pond were bottom feeders like the OK Krackers. We weren’t part of the official scene and we didn’t do a lot of our own cracking. Mostly what we did was download other people’s cracked games and spread them to BBSes in our own area code, adding our names in the process. Keep in mind that each of those previously mentioned group that “touched” a ware added an intro to it. If ESI cracked a game, you can bet a huge colorful eagle would appear before you ran the game, announcing that the game had been cracked by ESI. The courier who moved the game from place to place might add his own screen, too. By the time the game had been trained it might have three or even four intros appended to the front of it. Our way of thinking was, if we were spending our own time and money to bring all these games to our area code, we should get the credit for it too. <\/p>\n

In hindsight, this is a fairly immature stance to hold. Essentially it’s as if Robin Hood robbed a bank, handed a bag of money to someone else to run to town and distribute it to the poor, receiving the bag from that person and writing “BROUGHT TO YOU TO THE OK KRACKERS” on the side before handing out the cash. Although we did actually break the copy protection on a few games, by and large what we did was wait for other people to do the hard work and then slap our name on the front of the package. Pretty lame.<\/p>\n

Now even though we were young and immature and stupid, we all realized that slapping our real names on all of this illegal software might not be the brightest thing in the world to do — so, we chose aliases, which is kind of funny because we were already<\/i> using aliases, so actually we chose alternate<\/i> aliases! I was already well known locally by the moniker “Jack Flack”, so when my friend Klatu and I formed the OK Krackers we decided to use “fake aliases” so that our real aliases (and our real names!) would not be associated with the group in any way. In the OK Krackers, Klatu became Paladin and I, Jack Flack, became Metallica.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Teenagers (despite what they think) aren’t all that bright. I am sure there were people right off the bat who knew that I was also Metallica, and so (at least online) I began living this double-life of sorts. On each BBS I called I would register two accounts, one for Jack Flack and one for Metallica. Occasionally I would have conversations with myself to propel this goofy secret identity. <\/p>\n

At one point in time, we wanted OK Krackers to appear larger than it really was, so I created another fake user — Evil Dead — to grow our numbers. I don’t remember doing a lot of posting as Evil Dead, but occasionally when we would release an OKK graphic or slap our name on something, we would either greet Evil Dead or have him say a few words. Again, the amount of time and energy put into all of this was both dizzying and, in retrospect, sad.<\/p>\n

After hearing people whisper that perhaps Jack Flack and Metallica were the same person, I came up with a plan to throw people off the track. I wrote several letters from “Metallica” to Jack Flack, talking about upcoming OKK plans. I then left these letters lying around on disks and, when I would go to people’s houses to trade games, would make sure these letters were on those disks. My plan was that people would find the letters and think that I had accidentally left them on the disks. That way, the word would get out that I\/we were not<\/i> the same people, even though in reality we were. Are. Whatever.<\/p>\n

So anyway, that’s what I found last night — a long letter, written from Metallica (me) to Jack Flack (me) discussing whether or not we should let Evil Dead (me) into the OK Krackers. When people ask me, “What do you mean you didn’t date much in mid-high?”, now you know what I was doing — sitting around on my computer, writing fake letters to myself to perpetuate the myth that the OK Krackers had more members than it really did. <\/p>\n

Sheesh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My personal project to archive all of my old C64 diskettes into D64 disk images continues, slowly. It’s taking forever for the same reason it takes me forever to clean a room. “I’m off to clean the garage!” I’ll declare, with every intention of doing so. Ten minutes later when Susan sticks her head out to see if I need any help, I’m liable to be playing with old Star Wars toys, performing a puppet show, dancing around with a clown wig on my head, or sadly, some combination of the above. As I dig through my old computer disks,… (read more)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1651"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1651\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}