It was either 1994 or 1995 when I successfully badgered my mum to buy us a PC. A 486 SX 50 which I think had 8mb of RAM and a 250mb hard drive.

I remember going with a family friend to a computer night at a hotel. The room stank of smoke, it was virtually all men with the odd wife here and there. People brought their desktop computers and cabled them together - I think with serial cables. This was piracy in the pre-CD age. I think we got Doom this way, but more exciting… we could plug two computers into each other and play Doom against someone else. It was the first multiplayer game I ever saw (and, with hindsight, the first glimpse of networking which would eventually become the internet.) I think we used floppy discs back here to copy files - I have a memory of disks labelled 1/5. It was a year or two before people had CD ROMS, and another two years until CD-Writers were mainstream. We must have spent a long time swapping disks. I’m sure Windows 3.1 came on like ten discs.

Once CD drives were widespread, there was 650mb of space to fill and this was enough for a LOT of games or applications. Compilations came out - I remember Voodoo, Playdoh, Jurassic and Blobby off the top of my head. Even at about 12 I preferred the applications, but I didn’t have any use for them, nor any manuals. Without the internet, one really just had to click around and hope that the help files hadn’t been deleted to save space.

We’d go to computer fairs, and standing around on the street would be men with holdalls of and printed lists of CDs. Each CD contained a list of previous compilations and their contents so you’d probably have an idea of what you wanted. I think a CD was £10.

A listing

Since no-one had a CD burner, a gold CD was obviously a pirate CD - there was no other use for them. They’d just be handwritten in marker pen “Voodoo 5”. These CDs were the most fun - you’d get 30 games and 15 applications. A complete jumble sale. Things I remember getting on these CDs were Afterdark screensavers with flying toasters, 3D Studio and Visual Basic 6. I’m not sure I remember much in the way of games.

We’d share the CDs with friends, but a lot of the time you would need the CD in the drive to play a game. With only 250mb of hard drive you couldn’t have too much installed at once.

At this point, selling pirate CDs was still the preserve of geeks. It felt nice and illegal as a kid though. I remember even worrying about being caught walking from a friend’s house with a couple of Blobby’s in my rucksack.