Maybe “Lenna” AKA Lena Forsén, a 1960s Playboy model who’s picture was scanned in the early 1970s and used up and down in image processing research. Has a Wikipedia article.
Are you asking us or the first one ever? Must be some shared academic work over arpa if you mean in general
The history of software piracy is a reverse history. Somewhere in the 1960s code was getting robust enough that people would share their code across government and academic computers. By the time the home computer market became a thing in the 70s (Altair & BBS) sharing code was how enthusiasts actually learned to do things on their devices. Then in last days of disco a weird little Little St. James Island frequent flyer wrote a paper in a popular computing mag arguing that programmers should share because he was a greedy little entitled asshole who became the world’s first cintabillionaire by taking the OS code already freely shared with other programmers, copying it, slapping a copyright in it, and selling it back to the company that did most of the work on it.
One of the best jokes of the 90s:
“Windows 95 is a 32bit port of a 16bit shell for a 8bit clone of a 4bit operating system by a two bit company that can’t stand one bit of competition.”
It was almost certainly software like a game
Before even local networking was really a thing, people were pirating games by just sharing the disks
Don’t copy that floppy!
I’m pretty sure we pulled Dune2 off Usenet.
Why again did I need a double tape deck?
Before the net was widespread, I was 'pirating" for my Amiga 1000. This is why local Computer User Groups existed :). That and your local BBS.
Although Napster and music downloading really put it into the public eye, the first thing pirated, was definitely a game. We used to have to look up code words in the instruction manual to prove that we bought the game LOOONG before most people knew the high seas even existed.
Pirating games pre-dated a lot of widespread personal computers. I had some bootleg Atari 2600 games on audio tape with a module you could use to load them onto the console.
I remember photocopying game manuals at school to get around this. Lol
What do you mean by “pirated” and by net do you specifically mean the web or does the old internet and DARPAnet count?
As an example does guitar tablature count as pirated? What about the scan of a playboy centrefold?
