alt Hacker News>Only difference is time and dialup costs, but neither of those would’ve pushed somebody into the buy category.
well, if dialup cost more than just buying the game, it makes sense to buy it rather than pirate. also, if you care about audio then you'll get the cd, becuse downloading 400MB of audio over dialup isn't fun.
compared to that a crack is just a single binary.
Dial-up cost will be discovered later by upset parents, and you already have all your nice pirates games, which you would need to pay upfront with your own pocket money (if that existed).
But in any case physical copy + crack was the best solution at the time.