Marie Lechner writes:

“In the context of this continual game of hide and seek, the cultural industries have proven to be surprisingly creative in the strategies they employ to combat piracy as substantiated by the documents on display in this book: from educational flyers to intimidation, from hologram stickers to game alterations, from false TV signal detectors (mysterious vans equipped with weird and wonderful antenna that are supposed to strike fear in the hearts of those who have not paid their TV licence) to show trials such as the 2009 high-profile case of the Swedish founders of the emblematic peer-to-peer platform, The Pirate Bay. Pirate or “privateer” tactics are even employed by certain corporations. These tactics include torrent poisoning which consists in sharing data that has been corrupted or files with misleading names on purpose. In this particular case, the reader is at liberty to copy the texts of this book and do with them as he/she pleases. The book’s authors (editors?) have opted for copyleft, a popular alternative to copyright. The term copyleft was brought into popular usage by Richard Stallman who founded the freeware movement and refers to an authorization to use, alter and share the work provided that the authorization itself remains untouched. Pirates’ challenging and transgression of the conventions of intellectual property have become a form of resistance to the ever increasing surveillance of users of digital technologies by corporate and state interests. In doing so, pirates have opened the way to new “perspectives of counter-societies that work along different lines.”

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“Many of these users became its programmers and participated in an early version of file sharing. During the mid-1980s, Belgrade radio show Ventilator 202 broadcast computer software live so that listeners could record games and electronic journals onto cassette tapes. Some of this software was programmed and submitted by listeners themselves, reflecting an early open source ethos.”

Republished from Balkanist.net, don’t miss the charming tale of The Galaksija, a DIY home-manufactured personal computer, and how it led to over-the-radio filesharing in Yugoslavia.

Why are today’s hackers and tech enthusiasts interested in a little build-it-yourself computer from socialist Yugoslavia? The Galaksija’s unexpected success in 1983 sparked a minor computer revolution, and its influence on the region’s personal computer culture is still evident today.

“Alternate History” aficionados (who usually spend their time pondering questions like “what would have happened if the Aztecs had resisted Spanish colonization?”) have devoted significant time to speculating about an alternate reality in which the Galaksija computer exceeded Western models in popularity during the 1980s, saved Yugoslavia from dissolution and made inexpensive microcomputer kits available to the Third World. On the technical side of things, hackers, engineers and artificial intelligence experts continue to write dissertations and emulators in homage to the machine.

Though the computer used audio tape as its main storage system, had about as much memory as a single e-mail, and produced only three error messages (“WHAT?”, “HOW?” and “SORRY”), back in 1983, every curious tech enthusiast in Yugoslavia wanted a Galaksija to call their own.

Photo credit: old-computers.com

“We can only achieve the Computing Revolution if we have a domestic computer,” read an editorial in the country’s first publication devoted to personal computing. Back then, imports on items exceeding a value of 1500 dinars (about 70 euros today) were forbidden by law. Though some early devotees claim that foreign computers were available on the black market, they were still prohibitively expensive for the average Yugoslav citizen.

But it was these very restrictions and prohibitions that allowed an exciting domestic computing market to emerge. At the center of this new culture was the Galaksija, a cheap, build-it-yourself microcomputer with a modified BASIC interpreter and fantastically low res graphics.

Galaksija Magazine, January 1984

Many of the region’s talented computer scientists, hackers and designers first fell in love with computers through the Galaksija. The DIY computer kit was the brainchild of Serbian inventor Voja Antonic, who while on holiday in Montenegro had the idea to build an accessible domestic computer that would generate graphics using software on a CPU as opposed to an expensive graphics card.

Soon, journalist and tech expert Dejan Ristanovic assembled a special “Computers in Your Home” edition of a popular science magazine called Galaksija, with significant space dedicated to Antonic’s new computer of the same name.

With sales vastly exceeding expectations, the “Computers in Your Home” edition had to be reprinted several times, with a total of 120,000 of the magazines sold.

The little Yugoslav DIY computer was a huge success: in the beginning, Antonic and Ristanovic had hoped that perhaps a few hundred people would order the computer kit. The idea that 1,000 people would build a Galaksija was considered so “ridiculously optimistic” that it provoked laughter. But more than 8,000 people in Yugoslavia went on to build their very own Galaksija computer.

Many of these users became its programmers and participated in an early version of file sharing. During the mid-1980s, Belgrade radio show Ventilator 202 broadcast computer software live so that listeners could record games and electronic journals onto cassette tapes. Some of this software was programmed and submitted by listeners themselves, reflecting an early open source ethos. Galaksija games like Light Cycle Race and Diamond Mine were available free to anyone with a radio and a tape recorder.

No two Galaksijas looked alike. Photo credit: old-computers.com

Despite its feeble technology, the Galaksija continues to inspire fascination. Tomaz Solc, an electrical engineer based in Ljubljana, recently wrote his thesis on the Galksija’s technical details (among other discoveries, Solc has concluded that contrary to popular belief, the Galaksija’s operating system was not based on an unauthorized copy of Microsoft BASIC, but on the Tandy TRS-80). Solc has also created a number of Galaksija development tools which he makes available for free on his website.

And Bruno Jakic, an artificial intelligence expert living in the Netherlands, wrote an article entitled “Computers in Your Home: Galaxy, the New Wave and Computer Culture in Yugoslavia in 1980s” about the Galaksija’s place in 1980s New Wave culture. Among many intriguing points, Jakic notes that the Galaksija came without a case, meaning that artists and computer users built and decorated their own. Unlike the mass-produced cases of today, or the Galaksija’s 1980s contemporaries like the clunky Commodore 64 or the beige-colored Macintosh, no two Galaksijas looked alike.

Solc sums up this uniquely Yugoslavian contribution to computer history: “designers of Galaksija, being a couple of years behind state of the art in the West, were actually in a good position to learn from designers of other home computers… it was polished and simplified, but made more versatile at the same time.”

The original version of this article was published on Bturn, an online publication dedicated to the music, culture and style of the new Balkans.

The post Early P2P File-sharing and Open Source Practices in 80s Yugoslavia appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“At a time when commercial software and IT net-works gained momentum and complexity, a more or less independently instituted division of labour emerged among specialised pirates who belonged to what is termed The Scene. The Scene is the source of most pirated content that is made publicly available and then disseminated via IRC, P2P, and other file sharing services used by the general public. The Scene comprises, amongst others, small autonomous groups of pirates who compete to be the first to secure and release the pirated version of digital content. from which the content consumed online in the most well connected countries originates and which is subsequently resold at heavily discounted prices at stalls across the globe.”

Marie Lechner summarizes this article from the Pirate Book:

“Computer-based piracy was originally a means of distributing, testing, and getting to grips with technologies amongst a small group of users. It was indeed not too dissimilar from the type of group activity that brought into existence the free software movement. It was a commonplace occurrence to supply your friends and colleagues with a copy of software. Clubs formed and began to learn the basics of computer programming by decoding software programmes to the great displeasure of the then infant IT industry, as attested by Bill Gates’ infamous letter of 1976 that The Pirate Book has exhumed and which denounces amateur IT practitioners for sharing the BASIC programme created by his fledgling company Altair. IT manufacturers made a concerted effort to shift the original meaning of the word hacker (which until that time had been associated with a positive form of DIY) that was then conflated with cracker which translates as “pirate.” The view underpinning this semantic shift was later adopted by the cultural industries with regards to P2P users, and is analysed by Vincent Mabillot. This privatisation of the code and the creation of software protection mechanisms led users to rebel by cracking digital locks and by fostering anti-corporate ideas in the name of free access. At a time when commercial software and IT net-works gained momentum and complexity, a more or less independently instituted division of labour emerged among specialised pirates who belonged to what is termed The Scene. The Scene is the source of most pirated content that is made publicly available and then disseminated via IRC, P2P, and other file sharing services used by the general public. The Scene comprises, amongst others, small autonomous groups of pirates who compete to be the first to secure and release the pirated version of digital content. The Pirate Book sheds light on the modus operandi and iconography of this Warez culture (the term designates the illicit activities of disseminating copyright protected digital content) from which the content consumed online in the most well connected countries originates and which is subsequently resold at heavily discounted prices at stalls across the globe.”

Photo by Danielle Scott

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