This is pretty fricking amazing! Like most Indians of that generation, I got my first personal computer in 1985~86, with a preloaded pirated copy of Windows 3.1

This is pretty fricking amazing! Like most Indians of that generation, I got my first personal computer in 1985~86, with a preloaded pirated copy of Windows 3.1, pirated copy of Autocad, pirated copy of Prince of Persia, pirated copy of QBasic, pirated copy of COBOL, CLIPPER, a pirated database dBaseIII, another pirated database FoxBase, a pirated spreadsheet called Lotus 1-2-3, a pirated wordprocessing thingy called Wordperfect, and several other pirated goodies. I figure in today's environment that's enough to keep me behind bars for a million years :) But in those days, there was no other way to buy a PC. You bought a PC & you got all that pirated stuff, like it or not. So Prince of Persia was like THE game that everybody in India played at that point in time. My first 1000+ LOC program was a Qbasic routine to draw a pumping heart saying "I love you" mostly using PUTPIXEL(..) :) After laboring over that pumping heart dot qbas program, I finally worked up the courage on Valentine's Day to show it to this girl who I thought would fall in love with me after seeing it. Instead, she ran away & told her mom I was a freak messing with "the electronic compoooter" , so her mom got her married off to a proper MBA. She had me send "electronic mail" as email was called those days, to her rich friends using an AOL account.