briefly touched on the subject of bulletin-board systems (BBSes)
and our instructor provided the numbers for a couple of local
systems, which I proceeded to call when I got home. They were fairly
typical and boring for the time: systems frequented by off-duty COBOL
programmers run on a variety of home-grown systems, perhaps TRS-80's
or something running CP/M, exc
cker
communications on electronic bulletin board systems (BBSes) -
electronic message and file transfer b... ve an ardent
interest in learning about computer systems and how to use them in
innovative ways (Denning,... stance,
malicious hackers who deliberately crash systems and delete files,
but those hackers who explore systems purely for the intellectual
challenge and leave
ent Program. They had networked nation wide radar systems for the first time. The head of IPTO was
J.C.R Li... I do, it is
only to explore a system. Computers, systems, that's my bag. The phone company is nothing but ... there Mitnick learned the ins and outs of several systems, and then began using lower register voice to get... tnick was an expert, he was walking in and out of systems easily, and was also considering
employment in th
of Cyberspace, running on hacked
together systems, hooked into industrial 8" drives, and network-
... ime the eighties were upon us, the handful of systems
that had thrived during the latter half... had multiplied rapidly, giving birth to new systems on an almost
daily basis, and by 1982 th... is usually highly knowledgeable about computer systems
while managing to retain an oblivious naiv
was the place to be,
thousands of Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) had popped up around the
country. On a loca... ts, there are several things about
bulletin board systems that are missing from the Internet today.
Don't... ine per
day. So I don't miss everything about BBS systems.. But, looking back
on it, I wouldn't trade it fo... world.
After exploring several of the local BBS systems at a blazing fast 300
bits per second modem (I la
bulletin boards were run
as free public hobbyist systems and they operated on great state of
the art BBS s... .
This inevitably led to an increase in multinode systems which could
support more than one user online at a single time. Before this time,
multinode systems where much more expensive because they required o... r
their expenses. There were now large commercial systems operating
side by side with the small hobbyist sy
gonizing seconds to print out. Some more advanced systems supported 1200 baud,
considered quite speedy, but... real. This was a group of
computer bulletin board systems, or BBSs. They were way, way, primitive combinati... service
provider with a modem. However, most BBS systems had only one phone line; if someone else
was conn... respond in the interim. To keep things fair, the systems would usually have a
time limit for a single user
man's Scroll had the obligatory list of other BBS systems in the
city: the venerable Dog Star (which opera... n, my town seemed
to specialise on OPUS-style BBS systems. We had a couple Apple ][-related
BBSs, but most... bases, often shared between the various OPUS BBS systems, were
quite lively. The various echos kept you c... revious owner of my Amiga 1000, I was
calling BBS systems in Toronto, like the Toronto Sun and elsewhere.
years' probation for sneaking into phone company
systems and copying "higly sensitive" software. On the b... try it. He gave me the numbers of some hacked-out systems to call.
Theis all took a long time. The curso... box. VMBs are those
automated answering-machine systems you get nowadays when you call
big firms, and it...
made it to the press). You could also use come systems as
gateways to networks brimming with other comp
ere I learned how to break into military computer systems, listen into telephone calls, and eventually earn... her hackers across the country, and breaking into systems bit by bit. I came to specialize in Unix, chosen ... became a notebook listing the dozens of computer systems I had cracked. Many were choice targets-either telco systems or the sites of computer security researchers who
would be about pornography being available on BBS systems.
Back in those days we didn't have GIF's and JPG... of their newspaper available for display by BBS
systems, and TextView was a perfect way to display the da... erminated.
Before we knew it we had about 300 systems from around the globe. We had
approximately 130... the Internet.
At first, I thought that the BBS systems would be the gateway to the
Internet for the com
modifying financial and stock market information systems;
and Corporate planning strategies and their eff... efine hacker?
Not cracker. Crackers break into systems. A cracker may have the skill set
of a hacker or... hackers I know don't feel
the need to break into systems without permission. Heck, there's plenty of
folks that will pay them to break into systems they own. Notice that even the
work "cracker" is
dian law simply had
nothing to say about cracking systems. In the end, they were told that the
incident wou... r phones were on ancient "Step by Step" switching
systems, this meant two things. First, we didn't have tou... n't use
aliases any more, but when I was cracking systems, I used the name "Teesey"
(which are my initials ... ystem Cracking
I've cracked my share of computer systems. I've logged in and looked around to
see how thin
early 1980's,
to my knowledge. Most of the early systems were created by Commodore users
to be able to com... downloading. Users were
using automated dialing systems to check and download e-mail before they
woke up.... g distance. So users remained loyal to the
local systems and we returned that by offering the best enterta
spam. There were just home grown bulletin board systems that were fun
as all hell to interact with. No... ation?
Back in 1989 the two big mack daddy systems were TCCN(Twin Cities
Computer Network) and Gi... ing their new Internet access service. Both those systems were
pretty bland, but one of the very few mul