Crackers... Where are they now? What are they up to?

11 posts / 0 new
Last post
A2forever's picture
Offline
Last seen: 6 years 9 months ago
Joined: Dec 20 2003 - 10:38
Posts: 226
Crackers... Where are they now? What are they up to?

Remember those Crackers , The one's that made the Apple II software easy obtain? Easy to copy with not just COPYA but any other kind of copy program? If you were a kid growing up in the 80's then you know exactly what I am talking about . PLUS they made some really cool and interesting intro screens added into the software on bootup? Remember? Wow those were the fun days and it seemed to be the thing to do if you were a kid . Ofcourse there was also Phone Phreaking , but I don't really wish to get into that at the present time , hee hee , maybe some other time . But Where are they now? Alot of them have simple fell off the radar screen! I often try to keep in touch with a couple of them and try to hear about what ever happen to such and such? Anyone still keep in contact with any of the people from the past? Let's see , I remember..........

The Freeze
The Bum
Dr. Micro
Dr. Death
The Spaz
The Vid Kids
The Jerk
The Gonif
Mini Appler
The Blade
Black Bag
The Disk Jockey
The Catcher
The Tempest

The list could go on and on and on , for there were so many of them! I hear from time to time that some of them remained in the computer biz and went on to do very awesome and creative things for today's PC's or Macs. If you have some great info on what these guy's are up to I'd love to hear about it!

Especially any members from the Pig Sty BBS. Amd ofcourse The Bootlegger Magazine.

Thanks for reading :O) and I look forward to the replys.

A2forever

A2forever's picture
Offline
Last seen: 6 years 9 months ago
Joined: Dec 20 2003 - 10:38
Posts: 226
Re: Crackers... Where are they now? What are they up to?

lol tough crow ;o)

gsmcten's picture
Offline
Last seen: 5 years 8 months ago
Joined: Oct 4 2005 - 18:52
Posts: 2629
Re: Crackers... Where are they now? What are they up to?

LOL...

I don't think it's a tough crowd. There are just not many folks up this weekend. Smile

speedyG's picture
Offline
Last seen: 4 years 10 months ago
Joined: Nov 16 2011 - 07:45
Posts: 2493
Re: Crackers... Where are they now? What are they up to?

in earlier days I resided with the psydonym black crow and we had here in the Chaos Computer Club in Germany quite a bunch of apple freaks and cracks resident - most of them made mutation via PC to companies related to security stuff like McAffee and Semantec or similars.... I for example operated as freelancer on very large database clients up till Nov 2006 and then I got "out of order" ( i.e. out of business ) due to the fact that I had a second severe heartstroke.... the doctor gave me the "sit down and do nothing" card and the strict advice to stay away from every kind of stressfactors.... and being set in front of the choice - to continue and soon start counting the trees and the grass from below the surface or - resigning from all job- and sports-activities but having a good chace to survive some several more years I took the second choice....
and now I´m "back again to the roots" and activeted my entire Apple machines ( 1 Apple I, 1 Apple ][ europlus, 1 Apple //e, 1 Apple //e enhanced, 1 Apple IIGS Rom 1 and last but not least an Apple IIGS Rom 3 and a Mac G3... ) from my cellar and put them all back to life... and I´m now slowly but steadily trying to create an archive of all my Apple and ZX81 stuff ....
the ZX81 archive is meanwhile complete with more tha 200 Magazines from 1979 to 1986 and several scanned books resulting in 2 Double Layer DVDs comletely filled with .PDF Files and the job with the Applestuff is still incomplete ....
but in the meantime that archive has exceeded the 55GB barrier.... and I´m still continueing that task....

gsmcten's picture
Offline
Last seen: 5 years 8 months ago
Joined: Oct 4 2005 - 18:52
Posts: 2629
Re: Crackers... Where are they now? What are they up to?

Speedy,

Do you have a link for your ZX81 Archive, or is it just on disk?

I know it's kinda hard when the Doc tells you that you "Just can't do what you used to do." Been there. Whats nice for me is the fact that when I'm working on a project, if I start to fume over something I can just get up and walk away from it.
No harm; No Foul. lol Smile

speedyG's picture
Offline
Last seen: 4 years 10 months ago
Joined: Nov 16 2011 - 07:45
Posts: 2493
Re: Crackers... Where are they now? What are they up to?

hello gsmcten,
unfortunatly it´s not online due to the restrictions of my webspace, which is limited to 5 GByte. That website is allready crowded up with more than 1500 pages related to different topics (martial arts, zen, the history of the cheyenne tribe, different kinds of electronics like valve amplifiers, electronics for radio controlled models ) , so the remaining space is limited and I just started this week with the first few pages related to ZX81 and the Apple II Family.....
Up to this point nearly the entire stuff is on 2 double Layer DVD´s .... I´ve just taken a look at my fileserver and it claims the related directory to contain 22 GByte. Some more stuff has been added since the DVDs have been made.
In case of interest I can fry some DVDs and mail them..... at the moment I am building 4 "signalcleaners" for the ZX81
as described in the elektor magazine in september 1979. That box cleans and refreshs the signal from Tape to ZX81 that well, that you might be able to load old programms from bad tapes and the signal is after passing the box clear filtered digital signal. One is for myself, one for a friend of mine and two are planned to be sold at ebay. The second project at this time is two convert .p - programs to audio CDs that enable to use small portable CD-Player to load archived programs from CD directly to ZX81. The reason for that, is that even the portable CD-Players have better dynamics and therefor are more usefull for transmission. The old taperecorders and walkmans have less signalquality...... of course it´s a disadvantage that the CD-Player doesn´t save any data - but lots of ZX81 stuff like games don´t need a save.... and it´s more easy to load them from CD - because the CD-player can instantly play programms like soundtracks without the need to search the start of the data to transmit....
and at third I am building a frequencycounter for my hobby lab.... the last one i built some 20 years ago and the new one will be extended to topedge of countabel frequency of up to 1 GHz( the old one was limited to 10 MHz ).And I want to add some other features like counting periods ...

gsmcten's picture
Offline
Last seen: 5 years 8 months ago
Joined: Oct 4 2005 - 18:52
Posts: 2629
Re: Crackers... Where are they now? What are they up to?

Speedy,

Sounds like a hell of a website. lol

Please give the link. I would like to check it out.

Steven Smile

speedyG's picture
Offline
Last seen: 4 years 10 months ago
Joined: Nov 16 2011 - 07:45
Posts: 2493
Re: Crackers... Where are they now? What are they up to?

hello gsmcten,
the website is located under the link:
http://www.harrowalsh.de/
but be forwarned.... the main language in the site is german. This has several reasons:
In 1975 i emigrated to germany due to the lacks in treatment after i´ve executed four and a half years in ´nam -
in that days ( i was drafted rather short after finishing grade at highschool and my dad was soldier in the U.S. army )
after execution of duty it was precticaly impossible to continue scholar education... (i.e. replies like the following were regular: "we are so sorry for you Mr. Walsh, but after the 4 years of experience in ´nam we fear, that you are not able to integrate in any of our classes anymore..." and much similar stuff....) it´s a shame that a country picks you up and kicks you off to do your duty for the country and after you survived that mess with a silver star and 2 purple hearts and a bronze star that same country refuses to you the possibilty to complete your scholar education by giving you no chance to continue your education at college.... and i know lot off guys still in the U.S. with the same lack in their history....- ... its a joke of history that i recieved in germany the status of being "a political refugee from the U.S." due to the fact that my human right to continue scholar education has been refused...

anyhow... here in germany i had to run complete scholastic education as adult besides execution of jobs and learn german language, solved the german "abitur" and visited german universities ... ( its a bad joke that in the US they predicted me, not to be able to do that... ) and the proof that this was not true, was delivered by the fact that i completed here in germany 4 universitary grades ( diploma in mathmetics, electronical engineer for microprocessors, merchandising and company administration )within little less then 9 years... and all that besides execution of jobs....

so anyhow the major site has been started up some 8 to ten years ago and it was planned right from the beginning to be educational non profit site to the german platform with the aim to fullfill the following aims:
1. publish history of the cheyenne tribe ( my grandmother on the behalf of my father was native cheyenne... )
2. as result that i spent most of my youth time in Okinawa and therefor got plenty of knowledge with martial arts
and zen.... :
a) a complete view of history in the development of martial arts all over asia and a brief look at each kind
of martial art with small clips to each art and description of the main characteristics of each art, the purpose is
to support newbees in that stuff and orientation to find out which art is most common for the own comfort and
future training...
b) a closer view to those arts in which i graduated to mastership ( Okinawa Te, Karate, Kendo, IaiDo and Kyudo )
c) a brief intro to zen and the arts of zen ( meditation, ikebana, tea ceremony, craftmanship, calligraphy and so on )
3. different intros to topics of interest like at electronics with tubes, RC modelling and audio speaker systems...
4. computing
Up till 2 years ago the site was running on a server with Internet Information Server and the pages where designed with
lots of multimedia stuff like sound and videos but after the site moved to another server ( due to the fact that after my second heartstroke i had to scale down my financial debits due to the fact that my financial frame was limited down and i had to respect the neccesity to surpress the monthly fees to a provider ) the new server was running with linux and the apache server.... so lots of my pages where smashed with mistakes caused by scripts, that did not run anymore on the apache server - so i am forced now to revise the entire contents of the site and to remove the old ASP scripts and to replace them by new scripts for the apache server or to drop them... for example i needed to kick off nearly the entire stuff related to the topics of computing ( more than 900 pages with stuff how to create own home network, how to repair computers and how to diagnose the hardware mistakes ... or how to do programming in ASP and java and so on... )
that entire block on computing must still entirly be revised before it may be again online accessable... )
so unless you are not familar with the german language you will miss large parts of information there and
second hurdle will be the fact that in the block with martial arts there are huge video blocks with entire kata´s for
preparation to examinations and these movies need realy high speed internet access ( at least 16 MByte per second
i.e. DSL )....
and i confess that nowadays i´m too lazy to translate that mass of pages all together ( as explained all topics together asume to more than 1500 pages .... ) - so i now only execute translation to a very small part of the site...
but due to the fact that the topic raleted to the apple is international i started up the APPLEBOX now in english language right from the start ... but that part is not integrated in the main site up till now... thats a task that i will complete within the next 2 weeks, besides preparing a large sue of my girlfriend against her jobgiving company...
so please be forgiving to the bunch of problems with the site, that have not been solved up to now after the move to linux system like problems in navigation and so on ... just ignore them .... i´ve got a neverending list of pages with mistakes in the scripts resulting from the move and i can´t correct more than 1500 pages just in few weeks due to missing manpower.... and splitted and restricted human resources in my own person due to my health....
i´m spendeng each week nearly 15 hours to the task of correcting and replacing scripts within the pages from chapter to chapter....
the link to the new stuff in the new started APPLEBOX is:
http://www.harrowalsh.de/Elektronik/APPLEBOX/welcomeapplebox.htm
...within the next 2 weeks new pages will be made with lots of photographs to the hardware present in my collection
and lots of rare stuff not published in other applesites like speechinput system for Apple II, maintainance tips how to keep your apple in shape, details and hints on hurdles with diskhandling, working with sector editor on appledisks,
manipulation of operation systems, tips on debugging programms and so on...
and a similar block of pages related to the ZX81....
so it might be the best tip to revisit that area within specific periods of time...

gsmcten's picture
Offline
Last seen: 5 years 8 months ago
Joined: Oct 4 2005 - 18:52
Posts: 2629
Re: Crackers... Where are they now? What are they up to?

Speedy,

I enlisted in the NAVY in 1972 and was supposed to go In Country to man rivercraft, so I know what you were dealing with when folks were returning from 'Nam. Not our country's finest hour. I was in the Phillipines during the fall of Saigon.
It seems to me that you have done quite well moving overseas and getting your education there. Of course, thats just my opinion. lol Smile

Hawaii Cruiser's picture
Offline
Last seen: 7 years 3 weeks ago
Joined: Jan 20 2005 - 16:03
Posts: 1433
Re: Crackers... Where are they now? What are they up to?

You've asked this question before:
http://www.applefritter.com/node/24042

gsmcten's picture
Offline
Last seen: 5 years 8 months ago
Joined: Oct 4 2005 - 18:52
Posts: 2629
Re: Crackers... Where are they now? What are they up to?

Cruiser,

lol That was Patrick (A2Forever) asking about it.

Log in or register to post comments