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Comment by dleslie | Hacker News Reader

> I had a big notebook next to my PC with all the IPs written down.

Likewise! It was like having a secret code, or treasure map, and this data was much coveted among local young hackers.

There weren't many web sites, so I'll be honest, it was mostly IPs for ftp sites with upload directories that had accidentally been left open and were now filled with warez.

I'm a bit too young to remember the advent of the Internet but old enough to remember when the FXP scene burst onto BBS's with enough warez to fill every hard drive I could get my hands on.

hard drive? you mean diskettes, ZIP drives, and SYQUEST cartridges

Iomega Zip drives— still impressed with the choice of making the drives blue. The showstopper though, was my dad’s wood modem—I don’t remember if it was plastic or real, but it was purchased from a national retailer—not homemade and way cooler than the slate of white 56k US Robotics modems that followed!

the tape drives... 250+ MB years before iomega came along

why write them out longhand, you were just using ftp at a shell? I remember gui clients in that era that would store them. cuteftp on windows at some point mid 90s, and before that something else, maybe ws_ftp.

I’m not op but I have a very funny, related story.

In the nineties, my parents occasionally logged into my computer and stared at it for 15-20 minutes before going upstairs and turning on the television. Saving numbers in the computer box meant that I was breaking into the CIA and selling secrets to the Russians (while fornicating). Writing the same things down in a notebook was okay.

As soon as those client came along, I mostly switched. I don't remember any GUI clients in 1994.

One issue was that the GUI clients failed at most of the warez folders because they contained so many special characters - lot of things like ^H^H^H^H^Hwarez etc.

My experience predates the existence of cuteftp.

I was using gopher and telnet before Windows 3.1; I remember when HTTP arrived and ruined everything.

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