Cracked Software...
I bought my first personal computer in 1975. It was made by Commodore and the programs had to be typed line by line and saved to a cassette. Soon after I joined a club that would send out monthly games and utilities on cassette. We didn't have internet then and I bought a modem where you could put the telephone handset into a cradle used as an acoustic coupler to transfer data at the rate of 300 baud. That allowed us to connect with other computer users and mainframe with other means of connection.For me, It didn't do much more than keep records, low resolution images, basic word processing and a scientific calculator.
One of the guys in the club owned a car dealership and took courses in computer programming. He created a finance package that calculated car loan details of interest, payments and contracts. He connected it to an electronic typewriter and the contracts were printed on 4-part carbon copy forms. All of the records were save in his floppy disk system. After perfecting his 'finance package' he sold his software and hardware a complete packages to other dealerships and supported training, service and tax code updates. He had access to control all the dealerships and their client lists.
About 10 years later IBM computers became available. That was the time where people were using low speed connectivity via phone lines. I remember going to an electronics trade show to see companies had lots of business software and I recommended a package to get one company I worked for to use computers and get away from 100% manual bookkeeping. Part of their packages required subscription and their ability to access clients records.
A few years later and IBM clones were sold at a much lower cost than the original computers. Some of the reasons to buy cheap is they used cracked software.
A brief explanation is someone got into the original program and changed (cracked) the parameters so you didn't need an activation code or registration to use the programs.
The bad thing about cracked programs is who did the work and want 'gains' did they crack it for? I would guess (of the people I knew) half were using cracked software. In a hobby environment it wasn't so bad, but in a business environment, it was a no-no.
A friend told me the engineering firm next to his business had people using cracked versions of a popular design suite called AUTOCAD. One new employee didn't know his workstation had a cracked version and tried to do an update. The company information was in the cracked software and the update didn't match a registered serial number. If I recall, they had a few installations (seats) all using the same fake serial numbers.
Not long after, they were visited by police with a search warrant to seize all the computers using the cracked software. Along with the seizure were heavy fines for using unlicensed software. The company had to 'pay up' to stay in business.
They were lucky as I've heard other companies using cracked software had their data pirated that included bank account information giving access to the people who controlled the cracked software.
While some top level software prices have gone up, there are alternatives. Subscription, software is available. For example, If you cannot afford $4,000 to $5,000 for a purchase, you can access fully workings versions online without a large cash outlay.
I use PDF's in my business. Adobe was the original. It's expensive and I don't need to use all of it's capabilities, so I found a few competitors with fully licensed software at a fraction of the original. That works for me and no cracks!
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Some friends bought the Radio Shack TRS-80 released in 1977 and Commodore PET came out in 1978.
I built an IBM XT Clone (thank you Byte magazine). I sold that. XT became super popular and so did FIDO Net. While some guys were going to Discos to meet chicks, the chat rooms on my BBS became early computer dating. Pleased to report that nerdy women enjoyed sleeping with Sysops and Sysadmins in those years. Instead of disco moves I taught them assembly at my key board. I actually had a half dozen groupies. Nerd Heaven. Owner SYSOPs in the DC area mostly knew each other (met at computer shows and symposiums) and the women always were willing to meet new ones HIV wasn't a mainstream thing yet. I couldn't compete with FIDO. Also Ma Bell had applied to the FCC for permission to charge for lines carrying data and not just voice. Later I had to learn UNIX and some of the old ADA. At one stage the US Army made me a SysAdmin in their Pentagon Op Center. Sounds way more impressive than it was. But one of my old ROTC instructors who had been a CPT when I knew him came in one day for briefing when I was the doorman. He was an LTC now. We did a lot of, hey what ever happened to.. talk and that night I had dinner with him and his wife in Georgetown. I digress.
At work the Govt. sent me to DoJ's SANS and I learned how to write the first viruses and an intro to networks and how to take them down or seize them without anyone knowing. WordPerfect was the govt standard back then and we had come up with a cute, harmless virus that a few minutes after a document was typing the individual letters would drop to the bottom of the screen and break with a tinkle of breaking glass. So many calls of broken computers. LoL Reboot and the problem was gone. Writing and finding Rootkits and jeyloggers I learned at a FLETC extension course. Dual purpose chips were fun too. Enter the right source code and you had control of everything from the HD to the voltage in the keyboard. How fast does that HD spin, and at what speed do the bearings melt? The first RF trackers for surveillance, itsy bitsy Watec cameras smaller than a dime, Why run a full surveillance team if one of Subject's coat buttons was a tracker and another one a microphone and he/she didn't know it? Watch every move on screen from 20 miles away. Super cool on snowy or rainy nights. One of our groups was cut in half and those guys and gals volunteering went up to Ft. Meade's Puzzle Palace and the rest of us went on to do other more conventional things. So much of the things I knew are so obsolete now. I mean how many even have soldering itrons or Eprom programmers these days?
One of the big shocks some of my friends discovered when they bought computers at those bankruptcy stores was, when the US Marshals locked the doors and seized everything inside, if a lot of cases the hard drives were not purged of banking and customer data before the items were later sold. I do not know if the 'system' has since fixed that oversight, but I remember visiting a friend Sysop house and scrolling through page after page of customer account info left on the PCs he just bought at a sale of S&L assets.
Of course in today's world data can't really be wiped anyway. Sure, replace the file name with something beginning with a ? officially deletes it, but it is still there. You can over write it with 00s and for a few years that was sufficient.to keep children from reading it. But software technology gets better. About 4 years ago I very, very cheaply bought some used, formatted HDs at a flea market. Just for kicks I bought the data recovery suite Easeus sells and ran it on those "blank" HDs after putting them in an SFD reader board. Everything the owners had ever written became visible. One of them was an older WW2 vet who had recently passed. A pilot who had his own P51 at Manassas airport. Every photo he had, there it was, every letter he had written. The other had belonged to a woman (who at that time was still alive), again everything she had ever done on the PC was there including 'padding' from her visits to porn sites and chats, LoL. But that wasn't the end. Gpomh yp Hex I told the software to look for earlier writes and about 4 layers down I found the early ML codes the HD manufacturers put on the HDs BEFORE an Operating System is installed. That is the commercial standarrd of data recovery today. I supp-ose if you really wanted to amateur hide something you could pad with zeros a dozen times (instead of doing anything else that week)., jut I strongly suspect Govt could still read it with even more sophisticated software than we can buy. I have been trained in welding and have the equipment, so to destroy those HDs I slagged them to molten metal with a big rosebud on my torch then trashed the burned slag. If anyone can pick up anything off of that they are magical.