My Dad was (I was 6 and would tag along), in 1980-84 or so. It was a group of ~20 other guys, probably the only other Atari 800 owners in a 50-mile radius. Th

My Dad was (I was 6 and would tag along), in 1980-84 or so. It was a group of ~20 other guys, probably the only other Atari 800 owners in a 50-mile radius. They would get together once a month to show off new peripherals, pore over type-it-yourself BASIC programs from magazines, brag about high scores in Centipede, and of course, copy floppies. It was equal parts hobbyists club, amateur mutual tech support society, and den of piracy (though it wasn't called that yet). Here's my story. There was one guy in the group, George, whose basement was entirely filled with cardboard banker boxes. Some of them were packed with 5 1/4 floppies, and many more were Xeroxed documentation (both for defeating "look up the thing on page X" anti-theft, and just being able to use the software). By '84 I would guess he had 50k-100k disks, which probably accounted for a good percentage of the total software an Atari could run. The amazing thing about George was, he never actually used any of it. He disliked games, and didn't really need business apps. He would get disks in the mail (he used BBSes to meet other enthusiasts, but mostly traded via USPS), fire them up once to see if they worked, file them away alphabetically, and never touch them again except to make copies for others. He just liked collecting, or maybe hoarding is the right term. Anyway, it's my private theory that the whole edifice of pre-internet piracy would've collapsed without people like George. Of course, people would've still copied games with each other, but the 'scene' where you could find almost anything, including older and less-popular wares, relied on completionists pirating for the sake of it.