Gordon Bennett!
There have been a few attempts in my time on this planet at making money. Usually they start ok but then my personal unlucky entropy kicks in or I lose interest due to my unceasing laziness and lack of wherewithal.

Also I have noticed that there are lot of samey stories around including mine. I guess the nineties potential money makers all thought the same.

In chronological order:

- When I was just in secondary school I used to be friendly with the local newsagents. He used to sell me two or three month old computer magazines with the coverdisks for half price. I then sold these mags and disks to the boys at school for a decent mark up. I also used to buy jazz mags from him at full price, separated the pages, and then sold the pages individually for 50p each. I made quite a lot on those magazines which I then ploughed into my next venture.
- My next venture was the purchase of a 9600 baud modem, a 10Mb hard drive, and a pile of blank disks for my Amiga. I then used this to go to Swedish bulletin boards to download pron, games, and music demos. My dad hit the roof when he got the months telephone bill. He called me into the study and screamed at me for about 5 minutes. Then I handed him £65 quid which was just over what the international call charges were. He looked a bit suspicious but he was ok about it. I made tonnes of cash not only from my school but from other local schools as well.
- When amigas became a little passé and not quite as profitable, I pestered my parents to buy me a pc (486 SX25!) for ‘homework purposes’. I bought myself a new 28.8 modem and the cheapest 1X cd burner I could find and I basically repeated the system.
- GCSE territory. I got people to pay me £30 to do their geography projects for them.
- In university, as the only person who wasn’t an egregious IT nerd in my halls with a computer, I used to rent out my pc for emailing and essay writing. For the complete dunces I used to type out their essays for them for cash. I also started to build computers for people on spec and installing pirated software. For this sales opportunity I used to go straight to peoples parents when they came to visit or to drop their stuff off at the start of term.
- Then ebay came along and I used to sell loads of old tat. I also used to get special colour charity bracelets that weren’t sold in the UK, only in the States thus commanding high prices here in Blighty. I ordered tonnes to be delivered to my friends in the states and they used to send them to me so I could sell them on fleabay. That was super profitable.

When I got a proper job I didn’t really have time for hijinks like as described. However as I am now the CFO of a FTSE subsidiary multi million pound company I have slush funds all over the place! Yay! Unfortunately I can’t use them for myself or I go to jail. Boo!
(powervator and NONE SHALL PASS, Tue 5 Aug 2008, 19:48, 1 reply)

Pfft
How on earth could you replace an Amiga with a 486 SX25?? I mean gee. What a downgrade!!
PCs didnt really overtake the Amiga until the Pentium 3 and Windows XP came out.



I remember getting lots of money to print out Jolly Rogers Cook Book :)
(Miggyman, Wed 6 Aug 2008, 7:41, closed)