Another important thing that made software usage and education available for most of the world was piracy. I remember as a kid growing up in a developing country, any software (windows, office, Visual Basic, flash, dreamweaver, etc.) was less than 1$. That allowed me to try out and learn so many things on my own without paying a huge amount of money for the license. And I think this is true for most of the software developers of my generation who grew up in developing countries

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oska 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> windows, office, Visual Basic

This is all (Microsoft) junk and so I wonder if you actually benefitted from this 'piracy'. And of course, it's well known that MS turned a blind eye to such 'piracy' in lesser developed countries, as they knew that they were gaining a future paying customer base.

	▲	sajithdilshan an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I’m talking about late 90s/ early 2000s. Back then Microsoft was the state of the art when it comes to PCs. I remember using MS Frontpage to build websites back then and VBasic to build simple programs with UI and using MS Acess as a database. Of course I did benefit from it.
	▲	rootsudo 23 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You're saying that using the most used operating system from the 90's, the 00's and the 2010's, as well as the number one producitivty desktop publishing software and visual basic would not benefit a user, especially when they had a near zero cost to understand the core concepts of end user computing? Really?

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hungryhobbit 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Piracy created AI.