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Get ready, a 300 page pdf, not just your average run of the mill story. Marked for later...
This is dense. I skimmed through hoping to see examples of the “aesthetics” with screenshots of old school installers (like the ones from Razor 1911, Class, Deviance etc) - it looks like these are scattered around the web, though. If anyone wants to relive some of the old chiptunes from these installers there’s https://archive.org/details/codex-installer-music-5-2018-03-...
Razor 1911! Now here’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time, but teenage me was very grateful to.
The .nfo files alone, distributed with most releases, carrying the most elaborate of ASCII art. I distinctly remember the aesthetics you mention.
Remember realizing it’s 0x777, one better than 666?
Book site with info and other links: https://punctumbooks.com/catalog/10.53288/0339.1.00
Discussed a bit at the time:
Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29633143 - Dec 2021 (13 comments)
I own the physical book. I really wanted to like it but I found the style of prose grating and the overuse of "ibid" in the citations peeving.
I still remember the day, circa 1997, that I found an anonymous-enabled FTP site on a uunet domain that had been used as a drop site by various couriers, and let me tell you, this high schooler's 540MB hard drive was not large enough.
ftp.uu.net was a bit of a wild west for a while before it was eventually pulled.
I bought the print edition, which is a bit ironic.
I'm always a little surprised when I don't see mentions of FSP [1] in works like this. For a short time, it seemed to be the warez transfer means of choice for those looking to fly under the radar and avoid detection. (So I'm told.) But maybe it wasn't much more than a footnote in the grand scheme of things.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Service_Protocol
I always thought FXP was a much more common tool, as you could move releases between beefy servers without having to download them first https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_eXchange_Protocol