My high school had an electronics training course that was building decoders as a practical work.

It was good training for supply chain management and manufacturing. And they were selling them (illegally, obviously) and sharing the revenue between students and teachers.

Over the years and hundreds of decoders sold, they probably contributed to a significant loss of revenue for Canal+ in my hometown.

At my electronics engineering school we had access to everything we needed to mass-produce those decoders and did so at a reasonable scale to pay for our studies. That was a lifeline. Knowledge of TV signals gave me my first job, during which I got to work with the guy who designed the scrambling system and had a chance to thank him in person. Small world.

Minitel, an Internet precursor if you will, was launched in 1982, and in the 1990s there were 9 million of terminals at households. So there kind of was Internet, with message boards, chat, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

Really makes you wonder how they built the internet without googling a tutorial. One possibility is that they just faked it.

What did the poor Stackoverflow devs do when they encountered an exception :( ?

It was well known that pirate decoders existed and were available on the black market. I was a child at the time and I knew that some classmates had such things at home.

Yep. For premium cable TV channels in the US, the decoders were known as "black boxes" (because they were, literally, black boxes) and everyone knew about them.

Books! I had a side project that brute-force decoded VideoCrypt[1] in software back in the day, and I found out about how it worked from a book.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VideoCrypt

Even in the 90s, having a video input port was quite rare. It was actually a big plus of the mac of the time, they came by default with a lot of ports that were optional and required addon cards on PC: 16bit audio jack, scsi, RCA ports, etc.

Ironic given that it is now the other way.

In the 90s only a very few “AV” model Macs had RCA input jacks (2 Quadra’s using 68040 CPUs and later a couple early PowerPC machines).

You knew a guy who knew a guy.

They did bypass it. IT students built and sold unscrambler devices.