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72 lines
2.9 KiB
Plaintext
72 lines
2.9 KiB
Plaintext
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I'm reading through these old textfiles,
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completely blown away. I was also in the 914 area
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code, with the absurd little handle King Kilroy (like
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most of the handles, it didn't make much sense or have
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any meaning, but we were all stuck with one), and I
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also called Sherwood Forest all the time. As I
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remember it, that was the best of the 914s. Then I
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remember discovering the "war games dialers" (then
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called something else, since the movie war games
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hadn't come out yet) and getting my first batch of
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sprint codes and so being able to call outside the 914
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area code, and calling..... can't remember most of
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them. I remember a really good one in the 617 area
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code called Xavier or something like that, one of the
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earlier ones with a harddrive, a whopping 10 megs. I
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went so far as to sell the damn codes in the line in
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my school cafeteria, calling them "payphone codes".
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It seemed like a great deal to sell a hacked calling
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card code for a ham sandwich. Luckily that didn't
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catch on beyond just a few friends.
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I remember my father getting nervous when our phone
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bill went from astronomical to minimal even while I
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was using the thing five times as often, calling, as
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he knew, five times as far. Then I got the pivotal
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second phone line, so it was trading goofy atarisoft
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games all night over the applecat modem, which went at
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a blazing 1200 buad, which as everyone knew was the
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terminal speed for a modem, the fastest speed
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theoretically possible.
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It strikes me as intersting that instead of email we
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used voice messages or, since this was before even
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answering machines, regular old phone tag, at least
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when the person's line wasn't busy for hours and
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hours, since this was even before call waiting.
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Then I remember the dreaded advent of ESS, when
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suddenly all phone calls could be easily traced. No
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more making conference calls with every friend I could
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think to call, and no more war games dialing, or at
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least much less. Even calling TSS to get the credit
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ratings of my parent's friends got a little harder.
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Then that damn article "Night of the Hackers" in
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Newsweek, and suddenly everyone was getting arrested,
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or at least everyone said everyone was getting
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arrested. I re-read that article last year, and
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there's a line in it something like "you're constantly
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reminded how young these people are", and I'm sure it
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was true, but at the time it seemed like we were prime
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players in some sort of international espionage drama.
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Then Newsweek printed the sequel, "Return of the
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Night of the Hackers", detailing how the author had
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been deluged with hundreds of mailorder toilet seats
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and crap like that, then at the end of the month
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getting billed for all of it on his credit card.
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That's pretty much when I left the scene so I don't
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know what happened next. 1985?
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Anyway, thanks for the amazing archive, I still have
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shivers.
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King Kilroy
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Now for equally absurd reasons called:
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Hugh Mann
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http://wrybread.com
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