You were Zero Cool? Crashed fifteen hundred and seven computers in one day? Biggest crash in history, front page New York Times August 10th, 1988. I thought you was black man.
Your post raised two feelings: 1) Nostalgia about the 80s when I was 18 by the time you wrote your story 2) Jealousy, because in Brazil and in particular in the place I grew which was 70km from the biggest city, it was a telecom/computer nightmare at that time and neither BBS or computers were marginally affordable to most of us. Since I have watched âWar Gamesâ I was crazy to enter in that world which could start happening only after a few years in college.
Fortunately, the last till today ;
I feel kind of ripped off. Do you have any idea how much more difficult something like that is when the computer access procedure is âcarefully fill out a deck of Hollerith cards using an IBM-approved Electrographic pencil (no erasures, please) using Fortran IV ONLY (no other interpreter would be running; escapes would be rejected in the prebatch card transfer), submit for the biweekly area-high-schools-computer-clubs batch, then wait for fanfold resultsâ? The worst we could do was tiny. low-res, naughty ASCII art.
Jeff, it appears we led parallel lives! I graduated in '88 as well, and worked a summer in junior high at a computer store to save for a 9600 baud modem. I was phreaking like crazy, and wrote a popular program just like yours called HackPack. I ran two BBSâs: The Mausoleum and Afterlife ][, but my life revolved around Ultima III. Good times.
Awesome⌠Yepper, I remember those days of baud rates, BBS, cards/pins, etc⌠Thanks for sharing.
ceo
Back in Grade 11 in high school ( in the ancient year of 2003 ), a friend of mine got suspended for the last few days before the Christmas Break and werenât allowed back into the computer lab because of a program I wrote ( well, two, actually ).
The first program was pretty much just to annoy people. The school ran Linux machines ( which was pretty awesome ), and I wrote a bash script that would pop up a terminal that would display an animated ASCII art stick man sticking out his tongue at the user. The idea was to use ssh to log into another persons machine while they were using it and launch the script to freak them out. The problem was that the logged in user has to set a flag before sshâd in users can launch programs that require an X window.
So I wrote a script that would pretend to be ssh, and grab their password when they tried to ssh in somewhere. I then taught the other kids in my class about the talk command, and how you could use it as a MSN replacement â at least to talk to kids that were in the same class as you. So then we had a couple of our classmates passwords, and we were able to prank a bunch of them with my pop-up smiley face script.
But my friend and I bragged to another kid, who then tried to use the pretend ssh program to get teachers passwords and change his grades. He was found out, and pointed the finger at my friend and I. We admitted to it when called to the vice principals office. Thankfully, the system admin was there, and I was sort of friends with him. I think he was kind of impressed that I managed to write the scripts, and he knew that I was just being a silly hacker kid: doing something to find out if I could. Thatâs why we were only suspended for a few days, and not kicked out of school.
Anyways. Itâs nice to know that other people have their own childhood hacking stories â although I wish I had the geek cred to say I was phreaking in the BBS era.
@md2perpe:
âSo⌠Have you learnt how to access and use a woman?â
I would assume so, considering Jeff has a toddler and twin babies. (I might add, so do I: I found out about my twins soon after this post: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/10/on-parenthood.html high five)
@Chrisdunn 03: Everyone is always playing catch up when it comes to programming. That is how it is when you work in an ever-evolving field. The fact that the curriculum doesnt get updated every year i the bad part. Some schools still teach with pascal!
Now I know why I have to dial that unwieldy 12 digit code each time I use my calling card.
Spare a thought for this guy, whoâs currently fighting extradition to the US for having set up a web site providing links to pirated TV shows. Heâs not a minor.
Nostalgia is a powerful thing:
I had a really long winded comment about my own shenanigans from high school & jr. high and being a sysop in a pretty awesome local BBS scene, complete with an anecdote about almost having my own âvery bad dayâ dodging the v& (due to the heads up of a friend whoâs mom was the mayor, and the agent getting reassigned because of the OKC bombing).
But srsly, itâd be a blog post like the one above. And tl;dr, unlike this awesome article. =^.~=
Enjoyed reading your blog.
I once wrote an assembler as a teen and recall as the best days of life being a geek.
Unfortunately that was the last time I had fun doing something geeky.
I spend a lot of time on BBSâs also, with my Atari 1200XL and trusty modem. Where did all the people that enjoy the BBSâs go?
Maybe to HAM radioâŚ
-Dan
Ha! Another Chesterfield County kid here.
@James Atkinson, which end of Hopkins? I lived behind FCJHS near the reservoir and the north end of Hopkins.
Am I the only one who thought of Arrested Development when he mentioned the one handed lawyaer - âAnd thatâs why you donât write illegal software!â
I had the same problem on 90âs here in BrazilâŚ
A manager from a huge phone company here called my mom asking her to pay a bill of 250 thousand dollars (not updated to our reality)âŚ
Why?
They had a bug on their system that permitted me to take advantage of calling there redirecting the costs of the call to them (providers). I donât know exactly if you have this at your country.
You call another person but the costs of the call, if accepted after a message advising, is redirected to the person called.
Of course I didnât pay, even because their system accepted the message⌠LOL
But it was programmed to not accept. =]
Good times⌠Of phreaking, defacing, and studyingâŚ
Theese times gave me so much knowledge nowadaysâŚ
These times has gone⌠Now we are full of script kiddieâs that think they are âhaaaackorrrrsââŚ
But we still have good hackers making really good stuff cracking Sony, Apple and othersâŚ
Cheers
Ah, those were the days. Thanks for the story, it really took me back in time.
My first hack was in 9th grade in 1975. It was the first year our school had a computer class. We would use one of those teleprinters (a desk looking contraption with a keyboard and a box of formfeed paper under it on which it printed). The teleprinter was connected to the school districts mainframe. It was on this that we would write our BASIC language programs for class. I soon realized that since we had to log into the system with a school ID and a password, I could start guessing how to log into other schoolâs storage areas. Since our schoolâs password was some kind of fish (I canât remember exactly what now), I would try random IDâs, like one number off from our schoolâs ID, and then different types of fish for the password. It didnât take long before I was in and could view some other schoolâs student BASIC programs. And not only could I view their programs, but I could edit them too. I was an evil child, and would rewrite studentâs programming assignments. Sometimes Iâd just add a bunch of PRINT statements which would print out a bunch of expletives. And sometimeâs I would do other dastardly things like disable the BREAK key and then do page advances in an endless loop. Imagining some poor kid showing his program to his teacher and having it call the teacher a bunch of bad words or shooting paper out like crazy while trying to frantically stop the program. I know, not cool, but I still smile a little when I think of it.
Good times, good times.
This kind of stuff makes me want to get into programming more but Iâm still too lazy to try so hard.
Well, I can say I was the âlucky guyâ in the world of free BBS-ing in the circa-1990 times.
My father worked at the phone company (the only one available in my country at that time) and every friday, just before leaving the work, he went to a certain rack, disconnected certain cable and⌠tada! Free phone at my home the whole weekend! Of course he reversed the process the next monday morning. He was never caught.
I remember spending whole nights downloading stuff from BBSs while chatting with the sysops (bimodem rocks!). I was using a monster 1200 baud modem my father brought from work (which was already obsolete at that time and was going to be dumped) and I remember needing a whole hour just to download a 300K disk image for my MSX.
So I had free BBSing without any fear or legal problems. U jelly? 