How cracking started...

[SKiLLa]

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):

_hxxp://www.filfre.net/2015/12/a-pirates-life-for-me-part-1-dont-copy-that-floppy/
_hxxp://www.filfre.net/2016/01/a-pirates-life-for-me-part-2-the-scene/

[chants]

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.