The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Thirteen

Source

This series is dedicated to my friend ‘The Pieman’ who hosted ‘THE P.I.T.S’ BBS in New York City and sadly passed away in 2016. I know his son ‘Blake’ will be reading this sequence of stories with anticipation.

We will never forget you man, you were one of a kind.

Also I would like to say a big thank you to Fabulous Furlough, ex-leader of ‘The Humble Guys’ who helps me fill in the gaps of what happened almost 30 years ago, The Slavelord who has given me a plethora of memories from the early days and to Suicidal Tendencies (@trolleydave) who remembers more about the UK scene than me.

The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) is a continuation of my previous series, The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops.

I was once known as 'Bryn Rogers', a member of THG (The Humble Guys).

Other articles in this series:
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part One
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Two
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Three
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Four
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Five
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Six
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Seven
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Eight
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Nine
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Ten
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Eleven
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Twelve

August 1992

It was during the summer of ’92 when HootMon and I made some plans to visit the United States to do some sightseeing and to visit some of the US pirates. The tentative plan was:

• Fly into JFK (New York), meet The Pieman
• Fly to Orlando (Florida), laze around for a few days
• Drive to Fort Lauderdale to meet some other nameless BBS sysop
• Dump the car, fly to Nashville, meet Fabulous Furlough
• Fly to Phoenix, meet MickeySoft
• Drive to Los Angeles, meet The Bitch (who hosted a BBS in LA)
• Dump the car, fly home

I think it was August 1992 when we boarded at Manchester for New York, landed and made a beeline for Brooklyn and Hi-Speed Tech which was the name of The Pieman’s store at the time.

I have vague memories of the drive into Brooklyn and me looking around for gangster type mobsters who were going to car jack, or murder us while stopped at some traffic lights.

Source

High Speed tech is now CLOSED, though there's plenty of information about the company if you want to search for it

It didn’t happen and we found Hi-Speed tech somehow and The Pieman playing Railroad Tycoon.

He was expecting us as I had told him (and all the others of our pending visit). He greeted us warmly and took to HootMon quickly when he found out about his hardware skills.

‘Come and work for me man’. I heard on many occasion during our visit.

He had at least one bloke working for him, going by the name of Lance but the store appeared to be mostly void of customers.

It was hardly positioned in a shopping area, and I was guessing many of his customers were mail order.

Outside on the streets of Brooklyn it looked very dodgy. I asked The Pieman, ‘Is it safe’?

‘What the fuck you talking about man, there’s little old ladies walking over there’, as he pointed at a frail woman with a walking stick.

I don’t have a single photograph from those times, something I regret. I remember going to Manhatten with HootMon looking for banned horror movies (Something I had an interest in at the time).

Source

The streets of Brooklyn, New York. Safe for old ladies to walk down, and @slobberchops too...

We found a cult video store and I bought a bunch including the ‘Faces of Death’ boxset which made boasts of ‘Banned in 45 Countries’ all over the cover.

While you can freely buy gruesome movies rated NC-17 or even Unrated, they were strictly forbidden in the UK.

We visited The Pieman’s house later on a long tree filled street, and were casually introduced to his partner and young son who liked to scream, yell and cry a lot.

That ‘son’ is Blake who is referenced at the beginning on this article. Sorry man that is my remembrance of you!

I wasn’t really partial to screechy moaning crying kids and so HootMon and I kept to Pieman’s basement which was the home to The PITS, seeing neither woman nor kid again.

Source

The Pieman's basement wasn't as cluttered and messy as this, but it was full of stuff.

Now this was something else. It was a large basement, and one side was filled with computers.

There must have been seven of them, all with modems attached, screeching away as users were logging on and transferring files up and down.

Seven monitors were tied to them all and I was fascinated by a large multi-node BBS working in real time.

Some of these guys online I personally knew of and I had to stop myself from entering Sysop chats which might have freaked them out.

We were happy to sleep in The Pieman’s basement (after turning the volume down on all the modems), and had a great time chatting to him about scene talk, crazy Germans, rival groups and whatever sprang to mind.

The Pieman was such an easy going bloke that you could not fail to warm to him.

He was also an eternal pessimist or that was the impression he gave out. In summer it was ‘too fucking hot man’, and winter was ‘it’s fucking cold man’, so much that I was constantly laughing.

The laughter was contagious and he seemed to be smiling a lot when we were about, while finding something else to complain about that included the word 'man'.

Source

He took us to Queen’s one night to a Chinese place where they made the food in front of you.

It was lovely but the starter was the size of a main course and I ended up leaving the main. Such is the size of the US appetite.

The Pieman was driving this black ‘Lincoln’ car at the time which was the size of a small ship yet had little power. I did give him a lot of shit about that car.

‘My 1.8 litre car will blow this ship off of yours’, I used to jibe him with.

It seemed to be normal in Brooklyn for other cars to block yours.

Source

You had to expect these others cars to move yours up by smashing into the bumpers and then the same with the one behind to get out. Is this considered normal practise in New Your City?

Many cars seemed to have dents and bumper marks. I was just a visitor and all this was an eye opener for me.

Hi.T.Moonweed called Hi-Speed Tech while we were there and I first witnessed the ‘echo’ the American’s all used to talk about. This is what it was like on the other side of a Blue Boxed call.

I felt sad leaving New York City. We were not there for the sights and shunned everything a normal tourist would.

It was a well worth a visit just to see The PITS and the Sysop who ran it. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.

To be continued...

All images have been cited and are under the category 'Labelled for Reuse' or are in the public domain.

Small Pirate Icon Source

.NFO files courtesy of the .NFO libraries at https://defacto2.net

If you found this article so invigorating that you are now a positively googly-eyed, drooling lunatic with dripping saliva or even if you liked it just a bit, then please upvote, comment, resteem, engage me or all of these things.