The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops – Part Ten

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?

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The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops will go into some detail over the next few weeks.. er articles 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
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops – Part Seven
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops – Part Eight
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops – Part Nine

May 1989

Things on the employment side were stirring by the start of summer ’89. The company that I was never destined to work for (MSL) were suddenly losing some of their talent.

‘Jerzei Balowski’ was one of the first to leave along with one of the ex-MicroP renegade engineers to what I named previously as the ‘King of Distributors’, at least in my local area.

I still don't know what had caused the dissent at MSL, and though I am still in touch with Jerzei he doesn't respond quickly to messages.

The ‘King of Distributors' was P&P Micro Distributors. The company went bust in 1999, but that year was a long time in the future and not even registering in my brain ten years prior.

I was starting to outgrow Micro Peripherals and with my old mentor joining, I was suddenly very interested in getting in the door as you put it. Truth be told, I applied for a job at P&P in 1984 while I was at that shithole called Kwiksave.

A letter stating that I was interested in ‘working with computers’ had been ignored, even though my girlfriend Barbara’s snotty arsed pompous older brother worked there at the time. He was not going to do me any favours for sure.

I couldn’t blame them; A skinny self-filler who ripped off Atari 800 warez with no experience of the IBM PC or Apple range was simply not going to cut it at the time.

But this was 5 years later and I now had a wealth of experience using the former platform of the two mentioned.

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Rumours were that working at P&P gained you many benefits such as free lunches EVERY day at the canteen, frequent training courses where you were sent to London for three days with all the expenses included, and beautiful scantily clad women who would shake their flanges close to your nostrils while you fixed technical problems

There were certainly no free lunches at MicroP, I had attained my IBM Service Engineer Certificate it was true, but other than being sent to the further reaches of the UK to fix someone’s printer, training was simply not happening.

Yes, I wanted to work for P&P and I quickly contacted Jerzei to follow in his footsteps.

By May ‘89 I had owned an Amiga 500 for over 2 years. The was simply an inordinate amount of time to stick to the same machine and I was wondering what the next generation was going to be.

It had still not struck me that the computer platform I had been supporting and learning about for almost the last 2 years was going to be in fact, the final one.

The home computer boom of the '80s was in its death throes, and there would only be one real winner that being the IBM PC compatible. I suppose they are not termed as such in today's world; they are now named PC's.

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To own a PC in 1989 you had to be a geek. They were not mainstream and there was no PC World and huge department stores selling them. Dealers were starting to emerge but primarily for business use.

EGA graphics was still common though IBM had released VGA 2 years earlier. This boasted a 320x200 display resolution with 256 colours. Was this enough to be good for games? The Amiga’s common resolution was the same but with only 16 colours.

I was a formally a member of The Humble Guys cracking group ('Bryn Rogers') and wrote this NFO file sometime in 1992 at a guess, but can't for the life of me remember fixing Dark Sun II. Note the 'Honker' sound in the details. Who is Skylark? I can't remember!

The resolution and colours certainly were there, but there was something missing. The IBM had sound in the form of the internal speaker also known in the pirate world as the ‘Honker’. However, the PC speaker from these machines was primitive and could not compare with the Amiga’s superior sound.

It would take a different type of sound from PC’s to make any ground on the Amiga. It was always going to be more complex to coax music and sound from a PC, but it did happen and sooner than I expected.

To be continued...

All images have been cited and are under the category 'Labelled for Reuse'

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