Music records were the first digital thing to have ever been pirated, period (even before the net existed).
That doesn’t sound right. What are you referring to? Digital music piracy wasn’t really feasible before the mid nineties, but people were swapping home pc games and apps on tapes and floppies in the eighties. I’m sure there are other, older examples of software piracy as well.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 14 hours ago
People were converting vinyl and cassettes to digital files as early as the 70s after floppy disks were a thing.
Davel23@fedia.io 14 hours ago
People were not trading music on floppy disks. Digital music trading only became feasible and widespread with the introduction of the MP3 codec in the mid-90s.
bunnies@feddit.dk 14 hours ago
You can fit a single heavily compressed mp3 song on a “modern” 1.44 MB floppy. Floppies had much less capacity back then, and mp3 wasn’t invented, so the idea that people would be passing around ripped vinyl music on floppies makes absolutely no sense.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 13 hours ago
That’s why you either used multiple disks for a single file, or you converted it to a very low-fidelity format.
bunnies@feddit.dk 13 hours ago
So do you claim that this is the earliest form of digital piracy? Because it’s not really piracy until you share the ripped files, and you say that people were “swapping them with others after floppy disks were a thing”.
You are clearly mixing up the timeline here.
Patnou@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
What about the people who put wax on records and took it off and they could play that?