{"id":543,"date":"2009-02-09T10:42:12","date_gmt":"2009-02-09T15:42:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/?p=543"},"modified":"2012-12-10T17:09:26","modified_gmt":"2012-12-10T22:09:26","slug":"retro-scan-of-the-week-software-piracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/archives\/543\/retro-scan-of-the-week-software-piracy","title":{"rendered":"[ Retro Scan of the Week ]<\/span> Software Piracy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Software<\/a>It’s the software Vikings!<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Heh. And you thought digital piracy was a new problem. It’s actually as old as the PC software business itself. Some of the earliest evidence of this comes from a famous February 1976 open letter<\/a> to the Homebrew Computer Club in which Bill Gates (then “General Partner” of a small company called Micro-Soft) protested the rampant “theft” of his company’s popular Altair BASIC.<\/p>\n

Reflect on that date for a moment: February 1976 — less than a year after the Altair 8800<\/a> launched the personal computer revolution, people were already illegally copying Microsoft products with great abandon. (Some things never change.) Of course, selling pre-programmed software for personal computers was a new concept back then. And heck, personal computers<\/em> were a new concept back then.<\/p>\n

But as time passed and PCs grew in influence, the piracy problem didn’t go away. In fact, it continued as a hot-button topic throughout most of the 1980s. BYTE magazine devoted its May 1981 issue to the subject, commissioning its regular cover artist, Robert Tinney<\/a>, to provide a visual hook for the monthly theme. Meditating on “software piracy,” Tinney concocted a potent and iconographic image of a fierce viking ship cutting through rough seas, its massive floppy disk sail standing at full mast. To this day, the image (seen above) remains Tinney’s most famous<\/a> illustration from the BYTE years.<\/p>\n

If his prints of this image<\/a> hadn’t sold out long ago, I’d buy one in a heartbeat.<\/p>\n

[ From BYTE, May 1981 ]<\/small><\/em><\/center><\/p>\n

Discussion topic of the week:<\/strong> Do you pirate commercial software? Why or why not?<\/p>\n

If you use this image on your site, please support “Retro Scan of the Week” by giving us obvious credit for the original scan and entry. Thanks.<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s the software Vikings! Heh. And you thought digital piracy was a new problem. It’s actually as old as the PC software business itself. Some of the earliest evidence of this comes from a famous February 1976 open letter to the Homebrew Computer Club in which Bill Gates (then “General Partner” of a small company […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,7,27,26,10],"tags":[92,276,113,285,290,242,60,289],"class_list":["post-543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-computer-info-and-history","category-regular_features","category-retro-scan-of-the-week","category-computers","tag-92","tag-art","tag-byte","tag-copyright","tag-magazine-cover","tag-piracy","tag-retro-scan","tag-software-piracy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}