I honestly can’t recall how I even found SoftICE, but my uncle gave me a floppy with LJPEGViewer and the license was written on the disk. Eventually I lost the original but I’ll be dammed if I’m going to use Paint. I fired up SoftICE, managed to break before the “invalid key” dialog, and just did a cute little “return true” and that was that

Haha yeah. It was mostly just fun for me as a nerdy child who spent way too much time on Astalavista forum.

Cracking and RE were just gateways into a career in (defensive) security for me.