I've got two answers here, depending on context:
When we first got a PC, it was almost normal that you exchanged floppy disks with games on it. You bought something someone else with a computer didn't have, and you traded your games by simple floppy disk transfer. I must've been around twelve at that time.
Shortly after, things got "harder" somehow. But like console companies later, they were on a sort of war against everyone else. Cracks, modded patches, overburned CD's...pretty soon, the idea of still somehow being able to play game X after returning the original disk (which I started borrowing from libraries as well, btw) became the sport at a time. It's only a couple years ago that I got rid of most of those CD's, as they were (at that time) illegal acts whereas I hardly ever bothered playing anything of it.
For my second answer...If I calculate correctly, I must've been 28. It was the summer of 2009, and I was invited for a party at a friend's. Among the other guests were a couple with kids. At certain point, the father asked the host (my friend) if it was okay to entertain the kids a bit with this console. This was a wii, just like the one I bought for wii sports at one point (and was since gathering dust). For some reason there was a USB stick or hard drive connected to it. More so: that guy had a whole libary loading from his wii. At first I was just mildly curious: I knew about hardmods, soldering and stuff like that. Then was the first time I heard about "softmods", that didn't involve any hardware fiddling that could easily destroy your console (okay, perhaps this was exxaggerating, but I wasn't about to mess with console hardware).
Not long afterward, I started googling and learned about softmodding on a Dutch wii forum that I can't even recall anymore. This was the time of Waninkoko's cIOS and the first USB loaders.
What struck me as odd was that the hardware news wasn't so much a "everyone shares something" but more hierarchical: there were one or two main...I guess tutors are the best word. The guys that started threads and replied to most questions newbies like me had. And it also showed that their source was the same for about 90-95% of the time. This English site called "gbatemp" (you might have heard of it
). So rather than wait until they learned their stuff on that site, I decided to join the site and cut out the middlemen. And...
...well: I'm still here, aren't I?