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111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

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Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

#141

Post by TaylorAlexander »

KronisLV wrote: post #41
SpaceL10n wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird reading about my life as if it's history. Everyone was doing it. I remember my teachers, friends, and family all giving me pirated software at some point. I remember my friends and I getting excited when someone got a ripped copy of some game and we couldn't wait to burn new CD-ROMs to share. If one of us got our hands on the copy of some game, we all got copies. It was kind of like a free-for-all in the w…

> It's weird reading about my life as if it's history. Everyone was doing it. Here in Latvia that's still somewhat the case, at least according to statistics like these: https://eng.lsm.lv/article/society/society/latvia-leading-in... I've personally seen people who choose to pirate everything from movies, to OSes and IDEs, and have no problem with doing that whatsoever. That said, I can kind of understand it, due to…

Yeah I just run Linux and I’ve not needed to pirate or pay for software in years. Doesn’t work for everyone but as a robotics engineer it all works out for me. It took me some time to switch from windows ten years ago but I’ve never looked back.

Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

#142

Post by rqtwteye »

twawaaay wrote: post #8

It may sound strange to people who were born later. But in 90s these mechanisms were in infancy. It was normal for computers to auto-login and have no password at all, processes could each read entire memory on the machine. Software was cracked the moment it came out and it was assumed people bought any software because they feared legal action rather than because they had no other way to get their hands on it -- lat…

Computing and software dev definitely was much more fun back then. No worries about security and systems way less complex. I often shake my head when I get a PR that adds one fields to the data model and you have ten different files changes in UI layer and possibly several services. Can't wait until AI writes that code and verifies it works across all layers.

Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

#143

Post by tonymillion »

13of40 wrote: post #87
SpaceL10n wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird reading about my life as if it's history. Everyone was doing it. I remember my teachers, friends, and family all giving me pirated software at some point. I remember my friends and I getting excited when someone got a ripped copy of some game and we couldn't wait to burn new CD-ROMs to share. If one of us got our hands on the copy of some game, we all got copies. It was kind of like a free-for-all in the w…

When I was a kid it was an actual thing to know how to lift postage stamps off of envelopes with rubbing alcohol so they could be reused to mail pirate floppy disks to your friends. Try explaining that to a kid today and they'll think you had a stroke.

We used to just cover the entire envelope in Sellotape and put an address label over the top so we could just wipe off the postage mark - a dated ink stamp over the postage stamp (Royal Mail employees circa 1990 didn’t get paid enough to care) and use it again.

If you regularly swapped disks with someone you’d just mail the envelope along with the disk

Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

#144

Post by smeyer »

twawaaay wrote: post #8

It may sound strange to people who were born later. But in 90s these mechanisms were in infancy. It was normal for computers to auto-login and have no password at all, processes could each read entire memory on the machine. Software was cracked the moment it came out and it was assumed people bought any software because they feared legal action rather than because they had no other way to get their hands on it -- lat…

>I remember most teens and young adults (which is most people who used computers) would never buy any kind of software, music or video.

I don't think it's true that "most people who used computers" were teens or young adults. Since we're talking about Windows 95, here is some mostly contemporary usage data from the 1997 US Census[0]. A few of the strongest predictors of computer usage for a household are income, education, and using a computer at work. Being older (55+) is a pretty strong negative correlation (along with some correlated characteristics like being widowed).

I don't see a direct statistics tying computer usage to number of children, although the household size does indicate that houses with children probably are more likely to use a computer. Even just looking at the sample, about a third of households use a computer at work, at third don't, and a third don't work, which gives you a very large pool of people using computers who aren't teens or young people.

I suspect it's more likely that many of the people on this board were a young person in the 90s if they were a person at all, and so it felt like many computer users were like them. In fact, plenty of not so young adults were using computers.

PS: if by young person you just mean "under 50", I retract everything above and instead am confused by your definition.

[0] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/compute... , https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/compute...

Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

#145

Post by dopidopHN »

ilyt wrote: post #113
13of40 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was a kid it was an actual thing to know how to lift postage stamps off of envelopes with rubbing alcohol so they could be reused to mail pirate floppy disks to your friends. Try explaining that to a kid today and they'll think you had a stroke.

Uh, here since forever post office put rubber stamp mark on stamps to prevent that, I'm surprised there is country that doesn't

Yeah exactly. How do you go around the ink on the stamps? Ours ( French ) don’t go away with alcool. At least it was not the case in the 90´s.

Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

#146

Post by dopidopHN »

ilyt wrote: post #112
SpaceL10n wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird reading about my life as if it's history. Everyone was doing it. I remember my teachers, friends, and family all giving me pirated software at some point. I remember my friends and I getting excited when someone got a ripped copy of some game and we couldn't wait to burn new CD-ROMs to share. If one of us got our hands on the copy of some game, we all got copies. It was kind of like a free-for-all in the w…

My friend from school basically got his entire PC upgrades for good 5-6 years paid because he "invested" in CD burner (then-expensive devices requiring SCSI card to even work) and profited off copying business. Think it was around age of 10.

I started a « business » sending burned games to tunisia from rural France. At the time Tunisia had a thriving game cafe scene. But shitty broadband.

It was cheaper to find someone on a phpbb forum to send you physically something than dealing with ISP and shitty local internet laws.

It lasted for a year or so. I send hundreds of disks. Was getting pay thought bank wire on my older brother account.

I think I drink all of it in cheap pastis drink.

Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

#147

Post by userbinator »

l33t233372 wrote: post #131
userbinator wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the very least, no tools were ever made widely available, and don't seem to be even to this day. That's because discussions around them have been heavily censored by Big Tech in general; but that algorithm has been cracked, purely out of curiosity, in the late 2010s.

Where?

There's some discussions about it on a site which goes by the acronym MDL.

Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

#148

Post by Dalewyn »

twawaaay wrote: post #8

It may sound strange to people who were born later. But in 90s these mechanisms were in infancy. It was normal for computers to auto-login and have no password at all, processes could each read entire memory on the machine. Software was cracked the moment it came out and it was assumed people bought any software because they feared legal action rather than because they had no other way to get their hands on it -- lat…

>It was normal for computers to auto-login and have no password at all, processes could each read entire memory on the machine.

To be fair, this is specifically to do with personal computers of the time; MS-DOS, Windows 3x, and Windows 9x were all single user operating systems: They simply had no concept of multiple users at all. The concept was bolted on later as an afterthought, but it was really janky and paled in usability and security to proper multi user environments like that seen in Windows NT.

Incidentally, this lack of understanding multi users is also why it's a royal pain in the arcane arse to join a Windows 3x or 9x machine to a Windows NT network. A network is fundamentally a multi user environment, something Windows 3x and 9x don't understand.

As for memory access, this too was simply a thing of the times. MS-DOS, Windows 3x, and Windows 9x all simply did not have the concept of segregating and securing memory access between kernel and userland and between each process. All the BSODs that traumatized us back then stemmed from this architecture, and the BSODs quickly diminished once Windows NT became mainstream because the NT kernel operated on the concept of segregated and secured memory access for better security and reliability.

Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

#149

Post by Dalewyn »

tripdout wrote: post #89
treeman79 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linus from Tech Tips still pirates windows. He even has a whole video on why. https://youtu.be/M3bezYerYxQ

Is it even piracy when Windows allows you to use it unactivated?

Technically yes.

Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

#150

Post by batiudrami »

askiiart wrote: post #122
cm3hy wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cm3hy-26vyw-6jryc-x66gx-jvy2d reporting for duty. Probably did 50-100 OS reinstalls a week so it is burned into memory.

Is that also a key for Windows 95?

Windows XP, I believe.
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