Yeah…that’s not really the case, but I was around….lurking, downloading, missing things.
In the early/mid 90’s I finally got my 286 computer with my 2400baud modem up and running. It was a really big deal to me at that time. There was a book for the modem commands, a MS DOS book and a DOS prompt, that was about it. I had to find a communications program and figure out how to make that thing dial and connect to places in the world that I didn’t even know existed yet…I just felt they were there. I discovered Telemate and then the search was on for any information I could get my hands on.
Computer Shopper, that was the shit back then. It was this huge catalog that sold things, but had articles on anything computer related. The entire back of the massive book held an entire listing of BBSs. The bulletin boards had all their offerings listed and phone numbers.
I started racking up long distance phone bills pretty regularly. I was using the Computer Shopper to find BBSs, then scouring them individually for other numbers. I was downloading text files and information about anything and everything.
I read about the history of ARPANET and DARPA in ways that would have made my high school teachers envious, considering how little time I studied their lessons. I remember how excited I was to learn how to make Thermite and how to buy Magnesium strips to light it up. (I never actually did that, but I’m sure I could have with all the useful information I had).
When my phone bill went through the roof I discovered QWK mail.
The BBS (The one I frequented was &Temple of the Screaming Electron &TOTSE) would have a message area that had all of these different topics. They were a subset of all the topics out in the world, just whatever the community was interested in at the time.
I had my computer setup so that it would dial out after midnight, tell the BBS to package up all the message areas I was interested in, download it in a qwk file, upload a qwk file with any messages I had, then it would disconnect, load that qwk into an offline message reader and have it ready for me to read the next day.
Messages moved between systems in a way that felt like they were passed along a chain. If it was computer underground, I read it. I learned about the Legion of Doom, Masters of Deception, Cult of the Dead Cow and 2600.
I read everything I could find on John Draper and for a brief moment I seriously considered getting a Cap ‘n Crunch tattoo on my leg. I pictured the Cereal icon seated at a computer.
Even with this new scripting advancement the phone bills were crazy high back then. Now my more mature and fiscally responsible self cringes at the money that went into those early days of dialup. Then came
‘The Hack’
Several discoveries came together at the same time to make me believe I might just be the greatest hacker of all time.
I learned about Telnet and I learned that there were some governmental websites that offered free information on their systems and had 800 numbers. Much like I did with the long distance numbers I would call the 800 number, log in, and devour any information they had, and collect other interesting free sites from there.
I found one 800 number site that had a telnet menu of other government sites available and I would jump from one to another off of the same system. One night I accidentally input a selection that wasn’t in the menu. I hit a ‘k’ when it should have been ‘m’ or some such nonsense. That broke the menu and it just asked me to type in the address.
I froze. I disconnected. I called back, tried the exact same thing and it happened again. Any key that didn’t have a menu response just asked you for a telnet address. I grabbed my Computer Shopper, found a BBS that listed telnet access and away I went.
The next day I made a list of all of the sites that had telnet access and I ran through them like wildfire. For about a month I had free telnet to anywhere in the world and I used it to download texts from places that would have been a long distance call. Then magically that hole was patched and I was sooooo so sad.
That my friends was my greatest hack.