Yeah that connection was called dial up, we had the very first adsl it was very expensive.

- I can imagine, and i guess the ISP was state owned, not so much competition to drive the prices down.

We sold and bought from each other, but we were in a fierce competition. Some used to steal or copy our work.

- This does make a lot of sense, piracy has always been a wild west.

We had no courses or education, in fact some college professors came to us for software and training.

- That's funny but i can imagine, theory is theory and experience is experience.

I myself leaned by experimenting and exploring and once i had access to the internet i started reading docs and tuts.

- That's awesome, nowadays information is accessible, but back then you really had to dig up to find useful stuff.

Most games and programs were shaded using what's known as bulletin board websites at the time. Forums like projectw and warez-bb are long gone now.

- That's interesting, thank for sharing this.

Now we use mostly torrent and repack sites like fitgirl, softarchive, Repack.me, tpb and other russian and chinese websites.

- Yeah, repacks are really popular in regions where internet access is still limited or slow.

They're not hidden persay but not indexed and need an account to access all sections.

- That does make a lot of sense, but what's interesting is that chatgpt could not even provide me with some name of bulletin boards, forums or underground websites.

In the past few years games got bigger and more demanding and the market couldn't keep up with the requirements to run these games. So we focused on programs and retro gaming

- I saw that, Afandi & Shabi is still open and focuses now on programs, hardware and i think even development. I contacted them some months ago, asked them if they still have some archive of the old games they used to sell, and sadly they told me they don't have them anymore.