mirror-textfiles.com/history/dhobbs.txt

A brief story of a Hacker

by Derek Hobbs

	Born and raised in New London, CT I got into BBS's a little late in the game in terms of how long they were around 
for, but I had no trouble catching up for lost time. I got into BBSing around 1995 and I was about 14 at the time and I 
started out building computers from old 8088's on up to 586's. I acquired all these old parts from an old school hacker 
that had been programming since 1979 and had a government issued warning from the U.S. Navy as being a .bad influence.. 
This was the beginning of my mentorship so to speak. I discovered during this time that I could log into local telephone 
numbers  that connected to machines with my modem on my Packard Bell 486 DX4 100mhz (which was my first computer before I 
got the box of goodies to play with) and a world of door games, warez, forums, txt files such as a copy of the Anarchist's 
Cookbook opened up to me. I frequented a couple of boards more than the rest because they were a more local dial-up for 
me. The one board was called Sea of Noise ran by a man named Rob Szarka whom also ran an ISP(internet service provider). 
Then there was this other BBS called Norwich Exchange BBS and the first time I was poking around on this board the Sysop 
pulled me into chat and asked me if I was a hacker and we became acquantences. This female attempted to connect to my 
personal BBS I had at the time called Onslaught and we ended up hooking up, however she turned out to be a crazy nympho 
whom was playing her boyfriend and one night when she was having a fight with him, she called me for help *sigh*. I didn't 
have a car at the time so I called my Sysop buddy from Norwich Exchange to see if he could have someone pick her up and he 
did. He didn't seem amused when she came over there eyeing him up and down as it was causing problems with him and his 
girlfriend... oops! After this incident the nympho moved on to other victims and I lost contact with the sysop. This was 
just a piece of drama that occured from my use of BBS's. One of the things I really do miss playing the text based RPG 
(role playing game) L.O.R.D (Legends of the Red Dragon).
	I remember getting my hands on an old IBM PS/2 machine 
with a 2400 baud modem and wondered if it still worked and not only did I get it to work but I was able to still log into 
a BBS with it and boy was it slow, however it was still functional. Also during this time I was only in middle school and 
myself and this other buddy of mine would frequently hack into the schools computer's and back then DOS was the platform 
being used to run most of the applications the school used. This was a big mistake because they didn't configure them 
right and we were able to bypass all the startup files by holding down the shift key on startup. This would inevitably 
result in a C:\> prompt and this was as good as gold in terms of having control of the system. 
	One day while I was in the library installing a program to bring color to the drab black and white command line 
environment a nosey librarian came up behind me and asked me what I was doing? I said I was only poking around a bit but 
this machine had already been hit by my buddy. He edited the Autoexec.bat file which is one of the startup files that DOS 
used and put an echo line that read "fuck you" when the computer started up. I merely mentioned to the librarian that if 
it would keep me out of trouble I said I could remove the "fuck you" from appearing when the computer started up, she 
grumbled something about having already calling a technician to come in and fix this. I chuckled at the absurdity of 
needing a technician to come in and fix this when I could of locked it down for her but anyway I removed to "fuck you" and 
left something for the tech to change on his way to supposedly locking the machine down and put in a "Welcome" instead. 
The two lines could have been easily removed but they called a tech so I left the crap in there. 
@Echo off
echo "Welcome"
pause

	The school's guidance counselor's jaw dropped when I bypassed his password on his computer and I got into the C:\> 
prompt and proceeded to edit his autoexec.bat file to illustrate what I had done on the library computer.
Their macs were easy to crash as they couldn't handle buffer overflows and to much crap loaded at once and then shutdown 
caused them to puke and crash. Every mac I touched seemed to melt under my fingers so I never liked mac which is something 
I don't understand because mac is a Unix Os. They have gotten much better now but I currently use a Kubuntu 10.04 LTS with 
YaQuake terminal on my Acer laptop instead.
By the time my buddy and I got to high school we were both banned from using the computers anywhere on campus. 

I could go on but I have rambled enough for one text file, if anyone cares to read it.