It wasn't so much the making free phone calls, but it was exploring the universe that was on the other side of the twisted copper pair coming into the house.
A lot of « us » learnt to (love to) program or to hack on their crappy limited but « open » hardware.
This is not reproductible with an iPad or a smartphone and I’m really afraid that the current generation is going to let the machines control their lives because they’ll have no incentive to learn how to control the machines.
For this particular reason, I’m really happy that projects like Raspberry Pi just exists. And I’m pretty confident that my son’s first computer will be a Raspberry Pi 400 (or the equivalent, because he is too young atm).
I was probably 12 or 13 and had all the time in the world, but no credit card or parental permission.
I figured out how to reverse engineer those spam AOL and NetZero signup CDs you would get in the mail to extract their dial-in credentials for new user signups. I managed to use that to get free internet access for the Dreamcast!
I think I got caught when my mom needed to make a phone call... online gaming was tough in the days of 56k dialup.