My Business School Reverse Engineered your Business School
When I was a freshman in high school I stopped attending school regularly. I thought learning assembly and writing keygens were way more fun than geometry. I put the high school’s outbound number on call block so they couldn’t call my parents and spent my days learning as much as I could about reverse engineering software.
As I progressed in my ‘skills’ I was eventually asked to join a cracking group (a private, invite only, group that removed copy protections from software). After about a year I decided to go out on my own, and start my own group (sound familiar entrepreneurs?). So, me, and a few fellow crackers founded a brand new group, and started from scratch.
We had to do the same things all startup founders would do when starting a legit startup: formation, branding, recruiting, operations, business development, partnerships, and most importantly: execute.
To form such a group, one has to construct a name that hasn’t already been taken in the history of ‘the scene’. This is important, as you don’t want to choose something lame, and you want other groups to respect the name. Such names were something like: PREMiUM (‘i’ is always lowercase), ORiON, CLASS, etc. You also need to solicit the services of one of the ASCII groups (8bit artists from the DEMO scene) to draw an .NFO and file_id.diz file. These files had to be included in all your releases so that they gave attribution to your group and the FTP servers knew how many zip files to expect on a transfer.
