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I love stories of yore like this. I got my first machine in ~1985 or so... I convinced my dad he needed a machine for his business - and then I just played populous and called long distance from Tahoe to a BBS in San Jose to play the pit and trade wars.

I got grounded for a month because the long distance phone bill was $926 and my dad was furious.

He yelled at me one time and said "stop wasting your time on the damn computer - it will never do anything for you!"

Years later - after a successful time working in Silicon Valley building out many a thing, my dad came to my house and he apologized for yelling at me for "wasting time on the computer" - and I was touched that he remembered that time from when I was 11 and he said that...

My first machine was a Tandy 1000 - and I was also calling in to PC-Link (which later became AOL) to chat with strangers....

> because the long distance phone bill was $926 and my dad was furious

Blimey. I'm not surprised. In today's money that's $2,239.52. You were like a very early forerunner of those kids running up massive credit card bills on in-app purchases.

Great story though: thanks for sharing.

Long distance calling used to be a pretty big deal. Even intrastate calls outside of your local calling area could be expensive--in fact, sometimes more than interstate. For BBSs, there was various software available that basically let you logon, do your uploads and downloads of messages, hang up and do your reading and writing offline.

Go back a few years further and people would do all kinds of tricks if, for example, they just wanted to signal someone that they'd arrived somewhere safely. They'd make an operator-assisted person-to-person and the receiving caller would just say that person wasn't there and there would be no charge.

Call forwarding was one way to bypass intrastate long distant charges. My bestie ran a co-op. Members would get dedicated POTS line, add call forwarding feature, run a dedicated relay node. He maintained both dialer (client) and router (server) software. You enter phone number, dialer would pick a toll-free node in that general direction (telco provisioned prefixes corresponded to physical exchanges). Node would answer, decide to forward you to target number or next node. repeat as needed. The co-op spanned much of western Washington, from Bellingham to Olympia.

Phreaking as a Service

PhaaS

We can call the setup a PhaaSer. You're welcome world.

Bob Wehadababyitsaboy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JxhTnWrKYs

I immediately thought of this. Thanks for the link!

Having never been in the United States in the 80s or 90s, can some explain some background here?

It sounds very interesting but I cannot bring the pieces together.

You can (or could?) place collect calls in the US. The receiver of such a call then pays the bill. To prevent abuse, you give your name and then the phone operator will ask the receiver "do you want to accept, and pay for, this collect call from Bob Smith?"

The video is just making fun of that situation by encoding a message in the name.

Students also frequently had shared phone services of various types so they'd make a person to person call to their parents with some agreed-upon name and their parents would call back at the shared number. When I went to school we also traded cassettes because phone calls of any length were expensive in any case.

(The context is that long distance phone calls cost maybe $4+ per minute in today's dollars.)

I ran up a $400 bill one month in the early 90’s when I was in high school using a BBS in San Diego from my parents’ house in Escondido (roughly 30 miles away). Despite being in the same area code at the time, the rates were obscene and I believe higher than it would have been interstate.

My city used to be divided up like a pie. Calling from one pie slice to another would incur a fee. Near the center of the city the slices came together so calling someone across the street could incur a fee.

For BBSs, there was various software available that basically let you logon, do your uploads and downloads of messages, hang up and do your reading and writing offline.

I used to run a node of one of the first public BBS networks (1983ish). Messages went from one node to the other using store-and-forward overnight. With enough nodes in the right LATAs, you could send messages (e-mail at first, then bulletin board messages) across the entire region.

Where I lived at the time, I could make a local call between two area codes in two different states, so my node was very busy overnight relaying all the messages that got bottled up in either state at 300 baud.

And a few years before that to 1840, people used to perform similar tricks with mail. Prior to the introduction of postage stamps mail was paid on delivery¹, so you could send messages to friends or flood enemies with someone else picking up the cost. There is no new thing under the sun.

[/me holds breath for someone to point out an earlier version.]

¹ https://rmspecialstamps.com/about/history-of-stamps/

I did a similar thing when I was at college. I’d set up ‘Empire’[1], a sort of multiplayer civilization server at college, and I’d graduated to an Atari ST with a massively-fast 2400 baud modem (none of that 300-baud or even 1200-baud stuff for me!) which cost me a fair amount of my student budget for the term...

Anyway, I bought it 1 month after we’d all collectively rented a house, and we’d already had a telephone bill for the previous month. I think it went from about £50 to about £350 for that month, after which I discovered the joys of downloading the game state (built into the game) and writing scripts to make my moves, then uploading those moves in one go, rather than doing everything interactively while online.

Now, I have a 1 Gbit always-on connection :) Tempus Fugit.

[1] I was planning to link to Wolfpack empire here, but I just tried and the site is down - I hope it’s just temporary because I still fondly recollect nuking the hell out of my friends countries... www.wolfpackempire.com. Okay, looks like it’s gone to https://empiredirectory.net/index.php ...

> massively-fast 2400 baud modem (none of that 300-baud or even 1200-baud stuff for me!)

My first ever income from programming was writing some machine code to run in a USR$ on an Atari 8-bit BBS. Turns out the XModem checksum calculation was slow enough that when 1200 baud modems came out, there was a noticeable delay between chunks for BASIC to calc the checksum. At around 20 bytes long, I was paid $20. Man, do I wish I could make $1/byte now...

I ran a few bulletin boards and definitely remember a few high dollar diner's club bills after discovering all my favorite high school PLATO games were available on a service of some kind. Later at college somehow a MUD ended up on one of the Decstation 3100s in the CS lab. That was the glory days of everything having an internet-exposed routable IP before the Morris worm proved what a bad idea that was.

My dad yelled at me for spending all day on the computer learning visual basic. He didn't know the first thing about computers but got one because schools were starting strongly suggest essays were typed. Wanted me to focus on school work, not waste time learning some "nerd shit" as he'd later (half jokingly) say.

It didn't help that I didn't have good grades and got in my fair of trouble. I stuck with it though, and within a year of getting out of college made more than my parents combined.

My dad used to get a bit frustrated that I wanted to sit on the computer rather than tinkering with various engines (lawnmower, model plane, etc.) he was working with. One day I sat him down and showed him how I debug a bit of code, and the lightbulb went off that I was doing a very similar thing to what he enjoyed doing with engines.

We understood each other better after that day.

(Of course, now that I own a home, I wish I'd done more of the engine tinkering... I learned what a carburetor is and how to clean it via FaceTime.)

My sad thought is that today I'm probably never going to have the pleasant opportunity to be proven wrong by telling the kids to stop wasting their time on Fortnite :( .

"In comparison, the first computer I ever got was the ZX81 (in 1981, so about 8 years earlier) and it had 1K of RAM, came as components that I soldered to the motherboard (I was 11 at the time,"

Me too (turned 50 a few days ago). I persuaded school to buy a single ZX80, then quite a few 81s and a tonne of Speccies later on. Then you buy the RAM pack: 16KB luxury! Then you discovered a new use for Blu Tac - to stop the bloody RAM pack from wobbling.

I was more interested in the 'puters than the telly but I do understand your fixation.

I had a brief job in RNAC Manadon (Plymouth, UK) as an IT bod in 1993. From my (Windows 3) PC, I could telnet the Xn (n - can't remember the number) PAD, then get myself to some box in the US and then to CERN for the www. I was asked by my boss to evaluate this new fangled www thing, compared to WAIS, GOPHER etc. I can't remember my exact findings but it looked like gopher to me because the cat pictures were not there because I was using telnet (Mosaic came later) and it looked to me like another menuing system.

I don't want to give you the wrong idea here - my bad phrasing above. As an 11-year-old boy, who'd never seen a computer before, I was more interested in the TV... I've often thought what my life would be like if my parents hadn't bought me a computer back then. It's had that much impact on my life...

[aside: story of how my parents got tired of me just using the TV]

About 3 months after xmas, I still hadn't soldered everything together. My parents laid down the law, so I eventually went into the garage and started soldering away. I took my telly with me :) Once it was all together (which wasn't really that hard) I had it plugged in and working, and I was going through the instructions to make sure it was done correctly... Then I proudly walked into the house and everyone gathered around the living room TV (the only other one in the house...) I plugged it all together and up came the boot screen.

Following the instructions, I typed in

PRINT 1 + 1 = 2 [return]

... and the computer printed '1'

At which point my father turned to me, and said "I knew something was up. You've buggered it", and walked out the room. It took a long time to get across the concept of logical true as 1 and logical false as 0...

[/aside]

Once that episode was done, though, computers took over my life, I graduated to the Atari XL (which Dixons sold for £129 with a disk drive) a few years later - it was supposed to be a shared computer between myself and my brother for another xmas present, but basically he never got a look in. I became the 'computer room prefect' at school when I got to the sixth form, I was obsessed.

When I went to college, I used my student grant to finance an Atari ST, and I'm convinced that my lab grades were better because of the beautiful DTP reports I came up with, when everyone else was on 80-character daisywheel printed text.

I used to regularly write code in GFA Basic, and then graduated to C, learnt unix and used my ST as a terminal, then wrote the MDK (a unix-like distribution like Slackware for the ST)[1]. I fell in love with unix at college and have never used anything else since. When linux came on a boot disk and a root disk (yes, floppies), that was when I started using it :)

Time passes, and until very recently I was in R&D at Apple. Everything from verilog for FPGA's, kernel drivers, PCIe bus drivers, system frameworks, app frameworks, and even full-blown applications. One project I worked on, I had to produce an operating system for something that didn't have a central CPU. That took me two years, but it was a lot of fun, and I believe will have enormous impact when it finally sees the light of day :)

I've been immensely fortunate in that computers (my hobby for the last 40 years or so, my degree was in Physics, but generally physicists consider themselves jacks of all trades. Pretty much everything deals with energy at some point...) are also my day job. Sometimes it's had its down-sides, but mainly it's been a blast :)

[1]: http://umich.edu/~archive/atari/Mint/Distrib_kit/Doc/readme....

The DECstation 3100 was a nice workstation at the time. When I arrived at the internship for my first hardcore software engineering job, I got our first porting 3100 for my workstation. We were a SPARC shop, but my mentor had still named the DECstation "screamer", because it was fast. Ultrix also had a few neat tools, like "dxdiff" (GUI diff program).

Wasn't it named uk.ac.kcl.ph.asterix, or had you Brits finally stopped driving on the wrong side of the internet by then? ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET_NRS

That was JANet [1], the fastest network in the world at the time, and it grew out of the packet switching research in the 60’s [2]. A few years later they upgraded to gigabit links and called <drum roll please> Super-Janet :)

You could send email to either form address, and there was an internet/JANet gateway that figured it out. Everyone decided it was easier to use one naming standard though, so we went with what we have today.

[1] https://www.jisc.ac.uk/janet/history

[2] https://www.newscientist.com/letter/mg24532640-100-how-we-ne...

You could announce your new website on USENET! There was a newsgroup just for that.

My first computer was a ZX81 with 1K of RAM, received as a soldering kit. We had the 16K extension, very sensitive and which made the system reboot at the slightest shock.

Yep, I remember it well... it’s weird that it took so long for people to realize that the solution was to decouple the two with a short n-way idc cable...

It was the motion of pressing down on the keyboard (or otherwise moving it) that caused the two rigid bodies (computer and ram pack) to momentarily lose contact, and boom - bye bye work...

Wow, I didn’t realize I’m older than the internet. When I have grandkids, I’ll tell them stories that start with your first paragraph.

Technically, older than the web. Unless you were born in the 60s or earlier...

>>Unless you were born in the 60s or earlier...

Just noticed on my most recent birthday I've hit 50 years in computing. I tell my kids "texting is so easy now, in the olden days, we had to go to the data center and take turns messaging each other on the operator console..."

I'm teasing them a bit much because we would go there and message each other, but the neophytes would go to the terminal room and we few cognoscenti would go to the machine room, just down the hall.

However I'm a second generation programmer. My mom learned to program in the era that spanned plugboard machines and mainframe timesharing. Prior to that women who worked in the industry were known as "computers"

that asterix.ph.kcl.ac.uk sounds familiar. did you host an irc server ?

Not at the time, no. All the computers in the office were named after asterix characters, but that’s probably relatively common.

Kinder eggs came out with a bunch of asterix-themed toys inside, and there was a frenzy of kinder-egg-eating to get your character to sit on top of your workstation.

We eventually got an SGI Indy, and that one was called getafix, because it was “magical”, in the Jobs sense before Steve made it a thing.