The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops – Part Seven
If you read The Kwiksave Chronicles of Slobberchops , then I can tell you this is going to be in a similar vein to that series. Yeah, it's going to go on and on and maybe never end. Ready?
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops will go into some detail over the next few weeks.. er article's about part of my life when I was young, misguided and brash.
Like many, I was once a Software Pirate. That's not unusual in itself but I have a few stories to tell about what happened, and I'll try and not bore you all to tears.
Other article's in this series:
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops – Part One
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops – Part Two
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops – Part Three
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops – Part Four
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops – Part Five
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops – Part Six
June 1987
During the summer of 1986, Henry Boot unceremoniously dispatched me using the clause 'Redundancy'.
This technical term worked well for them, but it was really a case of a management shift and the new breed taking a dislike to this smart-ass kid who sometimes was guilty of being a little mouthy.
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Speaking of the 'new breed', these guys were ex-builders and had only had a fleeting vision of what a computer was in their lifetimes as 'brickies'.
I suspect Henry Boot would have lost their lucrative government contract with the Manpower Services Commission in short order after I left as they now had no computer instructor and this was a mandatory position.
I found myself an unemployed layabout for the best part of a year and decided to go back to college and gained a couple of GCSE’s. I then gained employment in the summer of ’87 by virtue of another Atari co-pirate I had met named ‘Mad John’.
‘Mad’ happened to be the Engineering manager of a local PC distributor and managed to get me a position in the Technical Support department despite me never having used a PC or MS-DOS.
To say that I was like a duck to water was an understatement; this was what I was made for.
Command line prompts, Edlin, Ventura Publisher, Laser, Dot-Matrix, Daisywheel printers, this was awesome!
I had a lot to learn but soaked it all up like a dry sponge that never seemed to dampen.
(Yes, this is a scan of my REAL 32 year old business card, I used them.. er never...)
The early days of Micro Peripherals were fantastic, the management were unconventional, my co-workers respectful (which was a new thing for me) and I ended up staying late at nights just to learn more of this fascinating new world.
‘Mad’ was indeed quite mad and frequently drove his Renault Fuego like a deranged person, shifting the steering wheel erratically from side to side driving down the road at 60MPH while screaming the words in a feigned Scottish accent, ‘I canna hold it captain, the dilithium crystals’.
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The IBM PC and compatibles was hardly a gaming platform and it was not going to move my interest from the Amiga. What it did was raise my awareness of what it could potentially be. This was a platform that was scalable, something I had not yet encountered.
After maybe a year of working at Micro Peripherals, my co-worker who didn’t look anything at all like Alexei Sayle but had a similar real surname to his counter-part in The Young Ones, ‘Jerzei Balowski’ left the company for a local rival one.
‘Jerzei’ and I would meet again later at a different company but his leaving left a big gap.
‘Tecchies’ were starting to become ‘meat’ for the head-hunters and whoever paid the most got our services, until someone else was prepared to pay more.
I was a little pissed off that my mentor was leaving but was tasked by the boss, ‘Sedge’ to find a replacement.
I mentioned the local cracker and past game author, @steddyman to 'Sedge' and so was tasked to drive to his house that very evening and convince him to leave his current shit job of working for a catalogue company as a toilet cleaner to work in the budding upcoming computer industry.
Easy you might think? Maybe I didn’t sell it correctly, but a massive pay rise and working in IT seem to raise his suspicion levels that I may be getting him into the male prostitution industry instead. To say the lad had a hard head sometimes can be an understatement.
After hours of convincing him that he was not going to lose his anal virginity to a big dildo strapping 300-pound mama with a fetish for breaking in young lads, @steddyman agreed to talk to Sedge and Micro Peripherals.
Less than a week later @steddyman was working alongside me and took to it in a remarkably similar way to what I did.
To be continued...
All images have been cited and are under the category 'Labelled for Reuse'
Small Pirate Icon Source
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Haha.... Mad John... I'll pretend I don't know who that is.
Toilet Cleaner!
Where did he go to.. I hear he was in London somewhere but my info is 20 years old. You have to admit, you really wanted to keep that bog cleaner job?
Very cool. That is awesome that you were able to absorb things as easily as you did. I really wish I had gotten into the industry a little sooner. Although I have been using PC's all my life and I knew more about them than most of my instructors in high school, I was a little too late getting into the work force. I wish I could have been in it during the Golden Days when it was all new and everyone was pretty much just learning as they went.
It was a little like that, 'The Golden Days', never to be repeated in one sense and yet in another everyone has their time when its new cool and fun. You just need to right environment to learn in.
Another highly entertaining episode! Maybe @steddyman needs hours of convincing to be persuaded of the credibility of Steemit too.
Have a look at his post, especially his last and you will see that is a lost cause. At least he's still here... barely.
I did have a look at it! Haha.
I hope, after you had lulled him into a false sense of security you all took turns at dildoing @steddyman whilst singing the phantom of the opera.
I'm hoping he will come on here and give me his version of that night's events. It was over 30 years ago, and my memory tends to play tricks on me.
I have sent him the link and he will read it... ;)
Hehe, splendid!
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Oh yeah I remember the days of Dot-Matrix, have it double strike if you wanted better quality or, like I had to buy for school reports, the slower but nicer Daisywheel! Oh if I could just go back in time!
I really enjoy these trips down digital memory lane.
Oh man, I've still got most of this stuff up in the attic of my mother's house. Those Daisywheels would print slower than I could type - I remember racing one with my manual Olympia SG3 typewriter and winning. A full hour to print a ten page, single spaced document!
As a kid it seemed I was always using out-of-date or under-powered stuff. In 1994 I was given an original 1984 IBM PC XT with no graphics card - text only. But it's got a couple of Zork games, and the text adventure Leather Goddess of Phobos from the same company, and a version of Centipede that works with Ascii characters.
Funny how quickly tech seemed to age back then. An 84 computer in 94 felt like a dinosaur, but a 10 year old Thinkpad T400 still does just about anything you could ask of it today (except for 3D gaming) and we still use a Vista-era Core 2 Duo tower as our living room movie watching computer.
Now your taking me back. I never got to grips with text adventures. They were supposed to be well written, but I needed graphics. That kit of yours would have been hopelessly out of date by '94.
I used to support Daisywheel printers. You always got some joker calling up asking how to print graphics wih a daisywheel. Yeah.. OK!
I didn't get my first IT job until '96 (out of college) but fondly recall the buzz. Oh the days of staying late at night just to play and learn more. I'm going though my midlife crisis at the moment and yearn to do the same all over again as I moved away from being hands on technical. Getting there slowly though - it's a difficult balance with a young family and the inability to function on just a few hours sleep every night :D
It's great when you first start and you have that desire. It didn't last with me, and now its just a job.