While writing the software, "I lived on savings for a while and then I lived off credit cards, you know, using those zero percent introductory rates to use one credit card to pay off the previous card," Mr. Cohen said...
"This past September [of 2003] I had, like, no money," he recalled. "I was just scraping along and doing the credit card thing again."...
All along, Mr. Cohen had accepted donations from BitTorrent users at his Web site, bitconjurer.org, but the sum had been minimal. In October [of 2003], however, Mr. Cohen's father prevailed on him to ask a bit more directly. Now [2004], Mr. Cohen said, he is receiving a few hundred dollars a day.
"It's been a pretty dramatic turnaround in lifestyle in just a few months, with the job [at Valve] and the donations coming in," Mr. Cohen said. "It's nice."
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