In 1985 I purchased my first modem, a 300 baud Hayes, and connected it to my Apple IIe. Within a few months, a friend of mine, who was later arrested following an FBI investigation, taught me how to hack credit cards. Basically, he looked at his mom’s credit card, counted the digits, and wrote a program that randomly tried to mix and match numbers until it got a match for all sixteen numbers. Often it took weeks to get a single working credit card number which my friend, who will go un-named here, then used to pay for calls to Hong Kong from where we downloaded cracked software. Before he got busted, one of the software packages I downloaded was a BBS system. I put the disk into my Apple IIe’s floppy drive and, in the other drive, put a disk with a few games. I then told friends about the BBS and asked them to log in between 8 – 10pm to test the system, post a few messages, and download the games. Within a few weeks I was collecting milk money from my mates who used the system – all three of them although one later got free access for helping me run the BBS. Not the most successful venture I’ve ever been involved in, that’s for sure!
Do you remember the days of local BBS services? Where the SYSOP was God and you had to post cash or cheque to them each month to keep using the service? If so, you’ll be interested in BBS The Documentary.
I’m going to have to order that DVD just for the footage. It’s so hard to find sentimental satisfaction on the internet because there simply isn’t enough imagery to help us go back.
BBS days were sublime. They disappeared all too quickly… Anyone got a link to someone selling a time-machine?