[geeks] nerd reading for a Friday night ... old-skool waxed

[Sheldon T. Hall]

 Bill Bradford wrote ...

> WHen I attended USAO (.edu) in '93-95, the only modem dialup 
> lines to the
> VAX were for "IT staff use only".  So, I found a dialup 
> terminal server
> at OU (in Norman, OK - about 40 miles away) that was a 
> "local" call, would
> call up into that terminal server, then telnet (hah, someone 
> left it open)
> to the VAX that was about 100 yards from where I was sitting.
> 
> After the first couple times I did this, I got called into 
> the director of
> IT's office (I was a workstudy/lab assistant).  "We saw you 
> logged into the
> VAX after the labs were closed..."  I explained what I'd 
> done, and they 
> started using it themselves when all two dialup lines were full. 8-)

I like that!

When I was at Crosstalk/DCA, the VAX cluster had a modem pool.  You could
dial in, and the cluster used the same modems to dial out.  Someone figured
out that if you dialed in, you didn't have to log into the VAX, you could
dial right back out again if you could find an open modem and enter the AT
codes.  Essentially, DCA was providing free long-distance data line services
to every hacker in Atlanta.

Another interesting thing about Georgia in those days was that the State
decreed that any call to your County seat had to be a local call, even if
the call from the County seat to your house was a toll call.  This meant,
for example, that people in Woodstock, GA, could call Atlanta for free, and
people in Ball Ground, GA, could call Woodstock for free, but people in
Woodstock had to pay long distance charges to call Atlanta.  Big
long-distance charges, since the Nelson and Ball Ground Telephone Company
was really proud of their intra-state LD services.  Since all the big
services had their modem banks in Atlanta, every lawyer, hacker, or
CompuServe SysOp in Ball Ground got some buddy in Woodstock to put in a
phone line for 'em, and auto-forward it to whatever modem number in Atlanta
they always wanted to call.

Ah, the pre-internet days!  War-dialing!  Blue-boxing!  Calling TELENET and
trying random numbers to see what you could find....

Kids these days don't know what fun is.

-Shel