&gt; When I was a kid you could hardly get any legal software in Poland too<p>True. Poland market was so small (and so far away, relatively - that was before fast Internet connections) that no one gave a &quot;flying fuck&quot; what was happening here. I remember buying pirated CDs in broad daylight at the mall circa &#x27;95, no one cared. A few years later I wanted to buy Visual C++ 6.0 (standard edition) and it took me half a year to finally get it - nobody had it for sale at all. You theoretically could buy software abroad, but then it was so expensive no one really did this. The only software distribution platform was sneakernet.