I was a kid in an Apple ][ pirate user group in Okinawa, Japan in the early 80's. My Dad was a schoolteacher on a military base there. We'd meet once a week on

I was a kid in an Apple ][ pirate user group in Okinawa, Japan in the early 80's. My Dad was a schoolteacher on a military base there. We'd meet once a week on Sunday afternoons in the High School cafeteria, everyone lugging in their computers and boxes of blank disks. And what did we do? We copied. The club had massive binders full of hundreds (thousands?) of 5.25" floppies. You'd "check out" a disk by replacing it with your membership card, make a copy, and return the disc. More experienced members could help you get around thorny copy protection, and people left helpful notes of which copy program worked best. They would also organize bulk purchases of cloned computers. My first computer was referred to as a "Happle", i.e. a clone from Hong Kong. IIRC we got the computer, a green-screen monitor, 2 slim disk drives, joystick, paddles, some games, and a 9-pin dot matrix printer for $1000. At the time, a regular Apple 2 cost that much for the computer alone. Our clone also had helpful modifications like lower-case letters and built-in keyboard shortcuts. E.g. ctrl-6 would turn into "PR#6" which was how you booted from disk. There's no way my parents could have afforded non-clone prices at that time, let alone purchasing software. So I'm very grateful for that club, and all the amazing software I got to try and learn from. I learned so much programming from Beagle Brother's tools [1] and had my mind completely blown by the Pinball Construction Set, which Steve Wozniak rightly called "the greatest program ever written for an 8-bit machine." [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_Bros https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_Bros [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinball_Construction_Set https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinball_Construction_Set