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yeah, sub0 is right, j?rgen paid for almost any crack even if he didnt told it the others. for j?rgen the scene was just a place to make money. later on he found a better place to make more money, but this new battlefield also joined more attention by the police…the rest is history.
sub0: call me , fauler sack!
BrainWalker, what was the deal with jurgen? can you tell about him? i remember he was hated by many….and he had to do with drugs or so.
I like interviews and life-stories of oldskool sceners
tell us moreAbout Germany having best groups…
There is one thing France (and also the U.S) both have and you guys don’t : it is a legal system that won’t let you mess with the telecom or software companies.
You’d hardly name one known guy in the french business who hadn’t slept atleast one night in a french jail (Ackerlight, B Monks, Angels, Paradox, Quartex, The Company and so on).
Some stayed longer, some had to pay massive bills, others got their hardware confiscated, and so on…
Do you remember of many french BBS’? (+33). In other countries you could run a BBS for AGES without a slight problem (even in the U.S tho’). Not here. It was like inviting the cops home.As for our US mates, being caught out there for blue boxing, carding or such could be a real pain.
Police and private investigators simply protect public and private interests. The hard way.
Guys, I remember running (with my mate link) in a commercial center, the original "Another world" in my left hand, and being followed by 3 cops. The guys simply identified our contact in a shop who was bringing games out for us before they really hit the shelves.
I already went busted 1 month earlier and cops took my hardware (and cash!), left me one night in jail, prosecution and all that shit.
No risk, no fun.In countries such as Germany, the police would send you a postcard telling you "Hey bad boy, we know what you’re doing. It is not good. You should ask your mummy about it. Also, you should stop being a bad boy or else you can forget about your Santa Klaus’ list".
Cool.In France, every two years or so, heads were being cut by a massive police action, bringing back the entire scene to day 0.
In Germany (and almost everywhere else), you could expect to last for a decade without a single problem.So some had a mature scene with rock solid groups/friendship/experience, doing the long run.
The others had some sort of latin anarchy – competition, where most sceners were acting like if there was no tomorrow.It is not like you could play the "50 games counter". The police was the one ringing the end bell.
Actually yeah. Even tho’ their games were plain crap they did a great job at busting sceners
However, the last wave of massive busts was linked the bl*e boxi*g era and government owned phone company action.# BrainWalker :
Paranoimia split into Skid Row and The Company.Why did they split?
Skid Row was cool… The Company sucked so bad… their releases seemed shoddy, although I can’t substantiate why. It seemed like the guys in "The Company" only cared about getting a release out of the door as fast as possible, everything else be damned. I don’t know why, I just couldn’t stand any of their releases, possibly because their intros sucked so much ass that I just wanted to smash the monitor! There has never been a group I felt so much aversion towards like "The Company".However stellar Skid Row was to me, "The Company" was their antithesis. Again, this is my personal perception, and I obviously look up to Skid Row as the standard.
Oh, and Brainwalker, what exactly was your connection to Skid Row, and how did that come to pass?
BrainWalker: I loved your intros. We want all of them on Kestra/Bitworld/Janeway. Please contact me if you still have your Amiga disks 🙂
Annatar: you will get Foxy upset in saying such bad things about The Company 😉 But it seems he’s not around anymore. Anyway Foxy if you’re around just send me a pvt message, I would like to have some news from you.ÂAnyway, that split between Skid Row and The Company, This is both true and simplification. True to some extent, after some time. Simplification because it’s a much more complicated story, involving many people with their own ambitions, and a wider reorganization of this part of the scene involving the birth of Angels, the nearly simultaneous collapses of Paranoimia and Vision Factory, etc.Â
Paranoimia died first in June 1990. At this time it was split between Angels (not The Company) and Skid Row. Again to simplify this a little bit, Angels was born mostly from the French-Belgian part of Paranoimia with a terrible leader (The White Tiger/TGS), and Duncan/ex-The Band in the role of the fancy puppetmaster. At least The Band was something. TGS was nothing before joining PNA. For The White Tiger I’ve never seen such other bad leader on the scene. Furtunately I left Paranoimia at this point and joined Avenger for a short time (Daniel was a very decent leader). I would have enjoyed pursuing this collaboration as there was a good atmosphere in this group, but I had to take a break of several months to manage personal things. And let’s get back to the main subject line.So Skid Row was mostly born from the German side of Paranoimia, minus Jürgen who made a tentative appearance in Vision Factory along with those who finally created Angels. For SR this meant basically FFC, ex-members of WoW who were later in Paranoimia such as Metallica and Eurosoft, Vision Factory suppliers (hi Subzero!) and other well-known efficient guys, also in the U.S, Then Skid Row became more or less a straight story, so let’s put it aside.
Angels was engineered on its side to be merged with the most active members of Dragons, a French group – let’s call it the frog who believed it was as big as the beef. In the end we have to recognize that the merger was a success, and that ex-members of Dragons clearly outperformed against all expectations. Of course they had to conclude associations with Genesis and Defjam, because they couldn’t reach out the same level as Paradox and Skid Row.Â
As no sane people could have worked for a long time with such a lamer as The White Tiger, ex-members of Dragons (say, Mr Video, Corsair, Foxy) left for Classic to meet another infamous guy (Zelnik) and work with their skillful cracker Ringo Star, then they joined Skid Row where they had bigger sharks around them. They ended creating Sprint, then The Company. This coincided with Jürgen’s reappearance at the head of a reborn Paranoimia zombi towards the end of 1990, The Company was born in January 1991, roughly six months after Skid Row, The Company was more a mix of several people including ex-Classic, ex-Angels, ex-Horizon, ex-Vision Factory members – only a few of whom were in Paranoimia. The split buzz takes into account the somewhat presence of Jürgen in the equation.
So basically Paranoimia split into Skid Row and Angels. Only later came The Company.
#1277 WayneK:
For some reason Germany seems to have the “early adopters” technical hardcore… On Amiga HQC and many others, on the Atari ST you had The Exceptions (TEX) … I wonder what it is about .de that causes this – are there just more strange/wierd people in Germany than anywhere else?Probably their education system, and their rigid mentality and discipline. Also lots of smart people in Germany, and by sheer number, if you have a country of 80 million people, statistics say your chances of having more smart & talented people are going to be higher. Germany does, if I am not mistaken, have the highest single country population on the continent.
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Annatar:
You just make things appear too simple about Germany. U.S.A reputedly have the best universities in the world (Harvard, Stanford, M.I.T., Berkeley…). If you have a country of over 310 million people, statistics say your chances of having more smart & talented people are going to be higher (and it’s probably true in this case). Of course, Commodore and Atari were American companies. So there seems to be a “bug” in your reasoning.
First let’s not going to expand too far on this population criteria. Norway has a population of 5 Million individuals, while Italy has a population of roughly 60 Million. Now let’s count the number and quality of demos released in these two countries. Mmmh… no, it doesn’t match.
So let’s list a few other well known criteria.
a/ Equipment in previous generation (8-bits) computers. A very active C64 scene gave birth to the Amiga scene. There was competition, incentive, motivation. C64 had the best music on top of any other good features. Enough to be attractive for many teens during the 80’s, and a prime reason for creating your own “tribes”.
b/ No other 8-bits computers gave rise to a similar scene phenomena. Before the Amiga I’ve been active on the CPC platform since 1984 (coder, cracker, supplier, swapper). There were clubs, no real groups during the first years of CPC. Clubs also were like permanent copy-parties. Only stand-alone people spreading their own releases with their handles. No intros, no demos, no groups. Also we were programming tools, small games, and of course removing protections before swapping with others. The first CPC groups came very late and mainly got inspiration from the C64. I wasn’t here anymore. The Amiga got me before that.
c/ Sales figures: C64 was the leading 8-bits platform in Northern Europe. Speccy was number one in the UK (with a lot of C64s too). CPC topped the sales in France and in a number of Southern Europe countries. Read this and compare with the Amiga scene at its beginnings. No comment!
Oh, why these sales figures? Of course, this is due to sales and marketing policies of computer manufacturers, and nothing else. There’s no country with intelligent or stupid consumers. Just the shops nearby, what you can find in these shops, i.e. computers, software, hardware extensions, and prices at which they were sold. Again, just logic.Â
d/ Equipment in modems in the mid-80’s to early 90’s. The funny thing here is Minitel. Millions had modems in France (including me/my parents), with models ranging from 1200 to 9600 bps (yeah, it was possible with the Minitel 2!). Two drawbacks: the network was only nation-wide, and if you had a Minitel, why bother getting a standard modem? If you ask early American sysops if they had a lot of French people on their BBS’s, the response would be of course “no, just a few”. The C64 sceners in Germany, UK, Benelux, Scandinavia who had modems and connected to US BBS’s were called real elite, they were kings with their 300 to 1200 bps modems while lamers were begging for stuff. At the same time millions had faster modems in France, but these were useless to reach the US boards. So came the Amiga, along with a different marketing policy, and with the Amiga the challenge of making groups and competing internationally. More USR HST were imported to France, and the country rapidly caught up its delay.
e/ Why more demo groups or more crack groups in certain countries as compared to others?
Let’s start with demos. For long Scandinavia made the best demos and their sceners were the most prolific in doing so. Why? Mainly because of seasons, and daytime. In winter when it’s dark and cold outside you come home and you code your next demo. You meet with your friends inside, not outside. Are you doing the same in Italy or Spain? No. Not because you’re uneducated, but because you often think you have better to do thanks to the better climate. Oh, and are Scandinavians good at football? Well… And are Italian and Spanish people better at football? Seems like…
Now crack groups. Here it’s just about where the games were going out first. We did say there was competition between groups to be the more elite ones. If you did not have the originals in time, forget it. Of course later when fast modems were widespread, you could lead a group from whatever country on the earth. Elite also did not have the same meaning. In the early years of Amiga, the first elite groups had their core members in one country – even preferably in one main city – because of the proximity between the original supplier and the cracker, this when both were not the same person. A spreader/trader nearby would also be handy. International people were here mainly for swapping and spreading the word and stuff. So, your best bet to become an elite group was one of three countries where the most games were released: UK, Germany and France.
And of course, not because some nationalities are smarter than others. Racism and chauvinism truly have no rational basis.
Added 17 minutes later:
Also let’s add this, if you allow me:
f/ Music in the 80’s, and musical preferences. I mean, different tastes on both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe new wave introduced electronic music to a wide audience. This was supplemented with ebm, industrial, and continued with techno music. These genres were marrying very well with computers. The group/band/tribe effect worked to its full potential. On the Western side of the ocean, music charts had more rock, blues, soul, with vocals, all things more difficult to reproduce on a computer. Hence, less motivation and incentive to make computer musics and demos.
g/ If you take US Robotics and similar manufacturers as the norm, modems were mostly “made in USA”. Also one should not forget that in many places in the U.S., distances are greater than in Europe. Los Angeles alone is 100 km long – and that’s a populated place! A lot of people live more remotely from downtown centers. Not only modems, but also radio communications, are more common than on the old continent. Thus, less demos of course, but also a lot more BBS’s and people using modems.
There are some very smart people in the United States, but most of the population is about as intelligent as a door nail. One of the reasons why the U.S. is in such a bad shape right now is that the plan was to outsource all the manufacturing, while the rest of us did the research and engineering, except… that did not materialize, as even those who could afford to go to college were simply too lazy and dumb to major in science and engineering… Ergo, now there is tremendous need for scientists, doctors and engineers, and nobody to fill those jobs… most of the population is only capable of basic menial work, and now that the manufacturing jobs are gone, the whole country is in a very bad shape…
I have studied this for many years. In the United States, the problem is in large part genetic. IQ is in large part inherited from parents; the other major factor is upbringing. Both are problematic, leading to the situation where the few who are either smart and educated, or completely corrupt command high paying jobs, while the rest barely scrape by. One acute symptom of this is that people are working 40+ hours per week, and still have to supplement their income with food stamps. Low IQ -> inability to major in science or engineering -> poor marketability -> low standard of living. And from experience, when you have existential problems, you are not likely to pursue intellectual subjects.Added 6 minutes later:
“Norway has a population of 5 Million individuals, while Italy has a population of roughly 60 Million. Now let’s count the number and quality of demos released in these two countries. Mmmh… no, it doesn’t match.”
I dispute that: Norway produced A.C.E. on the C=64, they had the famous Razor 1911 and Agile branches, they have Andromeda, they developed their own processor (the name of which I cannot remember right now)… for such a small country, those are tremendous achievements. And further proof of their brains is that they arranged for themselves a government and a country which provides them with close to the highest standard of living on the planet.> I dispute that: Norway produced A.C.E. on the C=64, they had the famous Razor 1911 and Agile branches, they have Andromeda, they developed their own processor…
I think that was N00w’s point.
@Bilbs: right, that’s it.
@Annatar: [quote: “I have studied this for many years. In the United States, the problem is in large part genetic. IQ is in large part inherited from parents…”]
This has to be one of the filthiest and wrongest arguments I’ve ever read, unfortunately not for the first time. There are so many reasons to disqualify this claim that I will only pick just a few. Also any proof of brains being arranged whatever you think they are does just point to your lack of scientific references. It seems you like to generalize even to people of your own country i.e. “most of the population is about as intelligent as a door nail“. I’ve been quite a few times to the U.S. – East Coast and West Coast, and at some periods I worked on a daily basis with American people. Besides the fact that you’re eating peanut butter and we prefer hazelnut butter mixed with chocolate, I don’t see many differences between us as human beings. We all have a certain small percentage of dull, completely stupid people, a majority of average people, and just a few geniuses. That’s everywhere the same. That said, educating systems are a good way to enhance brain logic and capacities to solve more difficult issues i.e. “science”, “research”, “engineering”…Here is a fact that some Educating systems are more Government-sponsored while others are privately-sponsored. I mean there that some systems do allow for more equal opportunities to access a better education. If the good schools are too expensive because their full revenues come from students and their parents, there will be no empowerment. Children of poor people will probably remain poor. Where’s genetic in this reasoning? Nowhere. Government policies do influence social conditions, and the laws of economics govern our lives.
Secondly, while evocating scientists, it reminds me that all the serious ones (not those with personal lucrative or political ambitions) say that we (any human being) are made up of 100% innate and 100% acquired characteristics. Apologies for simplifying a little bit the process, as it is longer and less obvious as it seems if you want to get a clearer and more complete picture. Please don’t refrain to do your Google work. So, these scientists are serious to say that there’s no objective criteria to state that our intelligence is inherited from our parents’ genetic capital. The fact that our parents do have books, computers, that they care for our education and are available to answer our questions, that they have received a good education by themselves, that other people around us also positively challenge our brains, etc. are far more objective criteria when it comes to enhancing our capacities.
Plus, limiting intelligence to one and only one thing is pointless. According to several representation models there are 16 basic types of intelligence. More complicated representation systems give up to 65536 possible combinations. To this, add the fact that we change over life, and are subject to both internal and external/environmental stimulations.
Lastly, any such reasoning that would be based solely on genetics would not only be wrong, but would doom us for the future. Why competing if everything is decided in advance? Why bothering to do any efforts? Let’s just wait for our death and hope for reincarnation in someone or something with better genetics. Laughs. Coughs. Let’s get some sleep now!
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