How cracking started...
 

This is an small historical article that I recently realized was published on how the wonderful world of cracking started. In reality it started before this but let's say the teaching was public at this moment. This forum is the oldest devoted to this subject (for English speaking crackers) with Over 15 years online (somebody correct me please) so I guess it's important to know the roots of the hobby that many of us have enjoyed for so many years.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Red_Cracker


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Interesting read indeed we have come a long way

(Haven't read Red's article yet)

I've been here 14 years which is less than a lot of people, and cracking was well established then. I remember cracking an Amiga game straight off audio data cassette which had an encrypting loader. The mysterious depths of XOR I believe :). Anyway, that must be somewhere between 20 and 25 years ago, and there was plenty of cracked 'warez' around at that time. There were cracking groups before that, communicating by FidoNet and sharing data via direct modem dial-up ftp sites. The internet was in it's infancy and not something the majority of people had acess to unless you were in USA universities. Discussion was by Usenet news groups, distributed via Fidonet.

Of more interest and concern is when did cracking start dying|?

Git (old)

Cracking started dying once there was no longer a need, i.e. tablets, iPad's, phones... PC's starting to become obsolete..

By the way, has +ORC's riddle been solved?

Amiga wasn't that old to use audio cassette,it were probably a c64 :)

check these links, here is mentioned the riddle and some solving/meaning:
http://www.woodmann.com/crackz/Orc.htm
http://www.home.aone.net.au/~byzantium/found/

You're right, of course it wasn't. It was an Amstrad CPC 464

yes,
any one can do any...
so first learn Cracking Application like
IDAPro, Olly, DotNet Reactor etc.....
You can do

Even I have almost zero knowledge still links shared on your discussion opens new ways of learning. :)

No,you can learn and crack but then you must be good enough to understand new protections.

you can learn to play piano,be able to play many songs but unable to compose.

Hello Dear
Almost last 0ne yrs not in this work anyway i came back
i started again

Good old +ORC, i published a pair of virtual cpus for serial checking with him! Good old times!
Of course my virtual cpus were totally inspired by infamous SolarDesigner's one.
Regards!

In Italy we had ring0 and later UIC that made the story of cracking/reversing scene in my country :)

I recall that even in the early 90s and late 80s it was mainly teens and students. And it was all about credits and respect. Making money was usually done by others ...

You traded 'knowledge' kinda like the demo-scene. Oh wait; there was a HUGE overlap (they called it 'affiliation' it for a reason, but that's probably actually less correct) with the demo scene, as is well documented over time (21st Centry, EPIC (from the Pinball), etc.)

Things have changed a lot; but I think the scene is still being 'innovated' and driven by teens and students nowadays, perhaps with some older mentor (kinda like here) wherever it is (China, Russia).
EDIT: The major change probably being the commercial aspect in some cases: from a few copied cassettes and floppies in the schoolyard to thousands of (CrazyBytes !) CDs and DVDs to global online-distribution on a major scale; look how Razor 1911 got caught/dismantled --> CC fraud with high-end $500 000 worth Cisco routers.

Besides people growing up and having a busy personal and business life, a common reason is: loss of data. I recall my SCSI HDD crashing (like: it wouldn't spin no more) with all kinds of sources I didn't have proper (read: latest, complete, working) backups of; it effectively ended my Assembly programming and RE for that specific platform. Did not have the means or motivation to recover; I moved on the PC-only from there on...

PS: I found these 2 blog-posts really representative and factual correct to my own experience and plain fun to read as well (part 2 is the interesting one, part 1 is just introduction):

Cracking started likely much earlier when the old mainframe computers were around and fixing bugs in punch cards and such could be done by deep understanding of manipulating byte code level instructions.

People who worked on the first computers had a total mindset for reverse engineering, and writing assembly code. Of course it is a past generation nearly and a lot of it was done under NDAs and government secrecy.

The mentions here are mostly of an online cracking community which developed as mentioned.

The current community has largely stagnated probably due to the modern generations not having a good old command terminal to learn on. All these touch screen devices seem to be negatively effecting people and turning them into disinterested zombies who can play but not effectively learn and go deep into technology.

I remember my first crack was a large 1.2M floppy disk. Then 1.44 MB small floppies. They had a control bit which it was not possible to copy.

Well, this is interesting and I can remember...
May be I really started with reversing in my middle age, about 30 - 35 years ago
+ORC and +HCU were already there and my first point of learning

And yes I also think that may have been started before, don't know how and if IBM big machines are had been reversed?

About this issue the now recovered arteam site contains what was on woodmann before, the Fravia, searchlores, crackz etc sites and of course arteam tuts.

We are recovering stuffs and put everything online for everyone on our url www.accessroot.com

Who remembers "crowbar"?

That's good. So who won the hosting war finally? f0il, Genesis or "big-mouth" Gregory Morse? :p
Hoping to see your site online soon bro!

Just look at the host ;)

https://www.accessroot.com/
>
https://www.accessroot.com/yates/
https://www.accessroot.com/crackz/
https://www.accessroot.com/searchlores/
https://www.accessroot.com/arteam/
... [and soon]
https://www.accessroot.com/woodmann/

Hi all
Thanks to f0il, we're again online (kudos, mate).. several things remain to fix, but slowly, we will fix everything. We also have plans to bring the site to life with WordPress slowly. There are new things that we have on our hard drives which are extremely interesting, some shared with us by seasoned glories of reversing ;-)

MarcElBichon had already spotted the new folders, but Woodmann was lost forever. He didn't make any backup of the forum or the collaborative rce tool library before going offline :-(

These backups, now online, were made by me right in time ...

My dream is to revitalise somehow (a bit) the scene, which for me means tutorials written for freely sharing knowledge and not for selfish or commercial promotion or pure piracy, as it happens very frequently ... something more punk.

Best
Shub

So finally it's been given to f0il :(
It's good that you got a hoster anyway.

Some interesting comments. But here in the UK, there were a lot of 8 bit home computers around in the 1980s (Sinclair and BBC being major players). Software protection was possibly in its infancy, but there were a massive amount of games being produced on both cassette and disk.

As a teenager, I got far more pleasure from cracking those protection schemes than playing the games. No manuals, tutorials, or even bulletin boards to help. It was all a case of self-learning, brute force, a lot of time, and patience.

It also helped me to gain sufficient knowledge to get a foot in the firmware industry, skills that is still help pay my bills.

Sorry to reopen this "old answer" but how old are u Git ?

Btw, in my side, i started cracking on CPC (good old speedlock and casssys on CPC tapes) when i was 12 years old (followed with Amiga (RNC protection), then PC Dos games)...

I feel like I'm getting old (I'm almost fifty now :( )

My early hacks where at a relatively young age, on a C64 on games coming from the UK scene and sold on tapes. As Arthur_plank told it was a very active scene, dominated by BBS instead of forums, to which I was connecting with modems. I was calling through blue or purple boxes and stolen datapac connections.

:D 1530 datasette,long time to get all the releases?!
I also knew this time of c64,great computer,we met in stores to make copies,Fast Hack'em!,action replay etc,poke 53280,1.
it were a funny time.

in the spirit of this topic : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKa3Hl6NH3Y

"What more can I say ? I wouldn't be here today if the old school didn't pave the way !"