Hacker News Reader

Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

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....

View on HN

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.)

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...

> 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

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 immediately thought of this. Thanks for the link!

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.

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.

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.

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/

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.

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 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 :( .

Reply on news.ycombinator.com