Warez Scene - History

History

The Warez scene started emerging in 1971s, it was used by predecessors of cracking and reverse engineering groups. Their work was made public on privately run BBSes. The first BBSes were located in the USA, but similar boards started appearing in Canada, the UK, Australia and mainland Europe. At the time setting up a machine capable of distributing data was not a trivial matter and required a certain amount of technical skill. The reason it was usually done was for the technical challenge. The BBS systems typically hosted several megabytes of material. The best boards had multiple phone lines and up to one hundred megabytes of storage space, which was very expensive at the time. Releases were mostly games and later applications.

As the world of software development evolved to counter the distribution of material and as the software and hardware needed for distribution became readily available to anyone, The Scene adapted to the changes and turned from simple distribution to actual cracking of the protections and non-commercial reverse engineering. As many groups of people who wanted to do this emerged, a requirement for promotion of individual groups became evident, which prompted the evolution of the Artscene, which specialized in the creation of graphical art associated with individual groups. The groups would promote their abilities with ever more sophisticated and advanced software, graphical art and later also music (Demoscene).

The subcommunities (artscene, demoscene, etc.), which had nothing inherently illegal with them, eventually branched off. Also, the programs containing the group promotional material, that is coding/graphical/musical presentations evolved to become separate programs distributed through The Scene and were nicknamed Intros and later Cracktros.

The demoscene grew especially strong in Scandinavia, where annual gatherings are hosted.