A 1985 Essay from a Bulletin Board System Admin Foretold Our Future
motherboard.vice.com
motherboard.vice.com
The reality is that by 1985 the UK already had the Data Protection Act, the US had computer crime acts in place, high profile hacks had occurred (notably the hacking of the Duke of Edinburgh's email in the UK), 2600 was being published, and WarGames far from being a 'hokey hacking movie' actually showed the reality of the sort of hacking that someone would undertake (dialing through phone number after phone number and accessing systems that were largely unprotected).
If you were immersed in the BBS scene or Usenet at this time these things were being openly discussed. This essay feels like a very basic summary of some of what was going on.
Of those, only AOL still seems to have any mind-share, and that's probably because it eventually provided internet email and browser-based web connections.
It's interesting that pre-web, you really had a number of largely non-overlapping online communities (which didn't even intersect all that much within the broad groups). I'm not sure that most people appreciate how fragmented the entire thing was. There was no real universal email for a long time.
Individual BBSs - which also had some shared boards through systems like PCRelay
Commercial "BBSs" like Compuserve, AOL, Delphi, etc.
Usenet which was the only one which was actually part of the Internet.
Nor how expensive it was.
Compuserve was $11 per hour. Delphi was $6 per hour.
$11 in 1998 is $22 now.
I was in 6th grade at the time and caused a number of rather large monthly bills to the point my family cancelled the service.
I did later go on to run a BBS which included FidoNet. That was incredibly fun stuff.
But, yes, it's free ;-)
So for me anyway its great to see these predictions coming out of the woodwork, and to recall some of the great, fine essays that were produced in the early years of electronic media consumption. So much great stuff, lost to the electrons of time..
But relative to now, gaining unauthorized access to a valuable system in the 80's or 90's would still be challenging, as the bag of tricks would be different, less widely known, and you might need more expensive equipment.
It's a pretty self-damning statement by the author that the extent of their research is confined to "googling". Motherboard Vice's about page says it's "With in-depth blogging, longform reporting, and video journalism, Motherboard investigates the news and events that are already affecting the years to come." This article falls short of any of that.
Edit: Tried to make my comment less harsh.
As someone who works in the press industry, but you'd be forgiven for thinking this is the case. There are a number of outfits doing hard hitting, deep journalism. Bigger names include NYT, WaPo, even Bloomberg. You are right in the aspect that those sorts of articles usually aren't headline pieces in favor of the shorter form click-bait. They do themselves a disservice in that respect. But don't mistake that for absence of good journalism.
It's a tradeoff and the fact that the tradeoff is so often made in favor of shallow and quick these days doesn't change the fact that most writers can't spend days making phone calls and visiting libraries for every piece they write.
Journalists often have to go and talk to real people in meatspace as well.
My first modem was 300 baud. You haven't lived until your mom ruined your 5 hour download of a sweet 300-500k game because she picked up the phone. Good times.
"Who were you talking to in Pennsylvania for four hours in the middle of the night for a week!?"
We also used keygens so we could play online games online for free with a burned disc (or to play over LAN).
Sure, I can play them now, but when dialing in to a BBS meant spending actual money on long distance calls, most people who played those games were pretty serious about it. Similar to how most DWANGO[2] players were also pretty solid and didn't mess around.
Another fond memory: finding a BBS list on one BBS, and then dialing into all of the new ones to see what they had to offer. Was a great way to spend the night while the parents were asleep.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend_of_the_Red_Dragon [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_Wars [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWANGO
http://motherboard-images.vice.com/content-images/article/no...
I get this impression the "research" conducted in the article involved actual printed material and not something like textfiles.org.
I quote-searched a couple of sentences from the article on Google, and got the article back as the sole result.
Underground Economies - You had a huge recession in the 1980's. People were not happy with the government and employment spiked to 9%. This idea wasn't a huge stretch considering the political and economic environments at the time.
Computer Hacking - Security was non-existent in those days and a myriad of high profile attacks had already occurred: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_computer_security_... It's a not a huge leap to see that security would always be a few steps behind well organized hackers.
Privacy - People have been talking about the loss of privacy going back to the 1950's and 60's with the Watergate break in. Nothing really big here, only that computers would make it easier to keep tabs on the general public, not harder. Hell, people were already talking about Orwell's "1984" which supposedly predicted a lot of what was going in 1985 - in 1949!!