Anyone who owned an Apple ][ back in the day will appreciate this. Just thought I’d share:
http://apple.duke.net/hackers.html
Memories…
Wow. I had tons of those. I think the only legal software I bought back then was Locksmith 5.0!
My favorite was Castle Wolfenstein. I think it was cracked by the Hard Hats or ???, but what was neat is that they somehow got music recorded onto the program. When you started it up the first few lines of The Smurfs (La la la la la laaa) was recorded on there- scratchy as hell, it sounded as if they recorded it off of the TV. How they did this back in 1983-84 is a mystery to me, but they did do it.
I still have my Apple IIc and all of these programs at my nephews house…Most still work amazingly enough.
-Tcat
Ooh, flashbacks. I’d kill for a copy of Star Blazer. I could even run it on my PowerBook in emulation.
Oh man, those were the days. I had a C64 and a friend who had links to a big cracking group. Through him, I’d get ALL the hot games, like Impossible Mission and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. his handle was “Asmodeus”. For C64 games you had to do something like insert errors into the disk files or something like that. I never really understood it, and I often thought he didn’t either.
I was young back in the C64 days, and I remember games had advertisements for Bulletin Boards (inserted by the crackers no doubt) during load time. I didn’t know what a modem was at the time, nor did I know what a bulletin board was…
I thought they were codes to somehow get to secret levels in the games. They said “visit these great boards”, so you can understand why I thought that. I tried typing them (the phone numbers) into the computer during the game to see what happened. Of course it never worked. I guess I was confused because a lot of them were in other countries, and had things like +011 which I had never seen.
Of course now I understand what it all meant.
I had Zork for the Commodore 64. I finally won the game in 1997.
Flash-back. Heh!
Wow. Great memories. I don’t know how I would have made it through my childhood without all those games–it was seriously dull where I lived and I didn’t have any real friends.
What blows my mind is how widely those were distributed, even without the use of any sort of “internet.”
Incidentally, almost all of those are downloadable on the 'net. Can’t post a link since the Angry Gods of Moderation would smight me, but you can find the ftp server if you search in google for “ftp” and the last name of the author who wrote the Foundation Series… 
Try http://www.classicgaming.com/vault/. It has emulators and games. I haven’t downloaded any but I plan to soon.