So, like you said, you started with BBSs in the early 80s.
Now, was there a certain kind of BBS software or a specific BBS that you thought really
influenced you at the beginning?
Not at the beginning.
I mean, the one I liked was RBBS and later on when I ran my own, I started with RBBS
and then somebody convinced me to switch to QuickBBS and that was a lot better and that
was the one that really got me interested in programming, I guess.
Not just using the BBS, but I actually tried to write my own after that.
Did you end up writing your own?
I didn't finish it.
I think everyone started their own and never finished it.
Is there a, I mean, so in terms of, I mean, RBBS, is RBBS and or QuickBBS the quintessential
BBS to you?
Those PC ANSI-supported 80-column BBSs?
Yeah probably QuickBBS for the public domain boards, you know, all the pirate boards ran
celerity or, you know, they're all the Emulex hacks it seems like.
Did you keep track of any of the ANSI groups that were going by and stuff like that?
Not really.
I mean, I remember, what, ACID and, that's the only one I can remember.
There was like ACID and ICE is the other one.
ICE, right.
It's all coming back.
Yeah.
Well there's ACID, ICE, TRIBE, others, you know, and the problem is what I find is that
it tends to be ACID and ICE and, you know, and there were like 200 other groups but never
got that name recognition.
You know, there really seems to be like almost a, almost a template for how your BBS has
to be in terms of like, you know, it's got to have a, it's got to have a dark adjective
and a dark noun so it's got to be forbidden castle or lost cavern or damaged, you know.
Yeah.
Well there was all the toxic wasteland type boards and there was one called festering
pit of file excretions.
Those were the pirate boards I think.
One of the things that's really lost is how much time you spend on your BBS, trying to
make it work.
Oh God, yeah.
Here are hours of it.
Yeah, I remember I spent, when I set up Quick BBS I spent, I think the whole summer, staying
up all night every night, playing on the same REM tape over and over all summer and finally
got it up and running.
Actually it was running the whole time.
I just was making it look better and working on the ANSI and doing all that stuff.
I asked this in a different way but, I mean, is there a specific BBS in your past outside
of your own that you think really has an influence on you or that's a particular favorite that
you are always trying to get on?
No, there's not a certain one that comes to mind.
There were some that were hard to get on.
The Lexicon was one of the big pirate boards.
I think they only had two lines or so but I can't think of any particular one.
They were all hard to get on, all the good ones.
I do remember though that we found out a trick, this was later when I was into hacking.
There was a Southwestern Bell system called DATU where I could call up a phone number
and enter, it was a Southwestern Bell lineman used this to access lines and if a bullet
board was busy I could call this up and enter that bullet board's phone number and it would
cause enough, it would cause the line quality to go so bad that it would drop carrier so
then I could get in so that was my way of getting into boards that were busy.
The pirate BBS's, especially now that pirate, now that pirating has taken on essentially
the same quality of pervasiveness as dope smoking, essentially now it's something that
everybody does and we'll talk about and there's a few every year who get whacked and then
it's the other millions who are just like, well bad for him.
Back then it's a different kind of environment really, I mean just the relative scarcity
of them and the amount of time spent, I don't know if you had any thoughts or opinions on
the difference of pirate boards in the past, what it was like.
I haven't kept up with the pirate scene, I'm a consumer now, not a producer.
Well I mean the mid 80's kind of BBS's, mid 80's early 90's BBS's.
You had the crackers, the couriers, the suppliers, I guess you have all that today.
I was a cracker for a short while and then a courier and then eventually moved on from
the pirating to the freaking and then to the hacking so pirating was just kind of a short
phase I guess on the road to hacking.
Now when you wrote ToneLoke, ToneLoke is significantly better than what comes before it.
I attended a war dialing talk in 2002, I attended a war dialing talk that covered and one of
his main themes was you should use ToneLoke because it's the only good one and this is
when I first encountered ToneLoke.
I mean did you have an inspiration for doing this program?
It started off, I actually went through another phase kind of after pirating and right before
freaking of voicemail box hacking and there was a voicemail system that had an administration
box and it had a four digit password on it and I was trying to hack this box so I wrote
this program called Boxer that just tried all the four digit codes and it would let
me listen to it on the modem while it hacked and that program later I modified it and turned
it into ToneLoke so it would dial scanning for PBX's and modems so that's how it started.
It wasn't even a war dialer, it was something else and then I first used it for actually
just for getting PBX's which you could use to call free long distance and freaking and
stuff like that.
Then I added the ability to scan for modems as I got more into hacking and eventually
that's all I used it for, the modems.
Did you get much, I mean it was more difficult back then than it is now but do you remember
any of the feedback you got from people or people using it in ways you didn't expect
or?
Yeah I remember I first gave it to my friends so we could all use it to hack PBX's and
then somebody sent it to one of the pirate boards and that's how it started to get popular
was the couriers back then needed to have long distance code so they could call it long
distance and send all these wares everywhere so they started using it to hack PBX's and
it just got more and more popular and I heard people would use it through, when you could
scan for modems they would want to scan an area that wasn't local to them so they would
actually get on an internet out dial which lets you access a modem in another part of
the country or the world through the internet for free and they would scan through the internet
using this remote modem, that was one cool idea.
Let's see one person used it to register for a class at UT Austin, they have a phone system
where you call up and dial codes and you dial the class you want to add and the class was
full and he really wanted to get in so he programmed Tone Locke to just keep trying
over and over until the class opened up and he finally got it.
What else?
There was another, oh yeah, someone used it kind of to harass somebody, they programmed
Tone Locke to call up a pager prefix and page 10,000 people to one person's phone number
and so that person started getting calls for starting right away for like two weeks on
their phone just from being paged by everybody so those are some of the weird things people
have used it for.
Yeah, I mean one of the things that's interesting about it is that it persists as a admired
tool.
I mean did you know about, how do I put it, it seems like a lot of programming experience
went into it.
I mean certainly your graphical representation of exchanges is highly touted.
I have to give credit to Mucho Moss for that, that was totally his idea and that was one
of his big contributions to Tone Locke.
I guess let me give some history on how he came in.
I had written Tone Locke and something happened, I lost the source code, my hard drive crashed
or something so I stopped working on it and he came across it and liked it and he wanted
to add some more features to it so he asked me if he could work on it and I told him yeah
but I lost the source and I don't want to rewrite it so he offered to rewrite it and
bring it back up to where it was and he did that and then we both started working on it
together from then on so that's why the Tone Locke you see now is his minor threat, Mucho
Moss and he came up with the tone map, the graphical representation which was one of
the cool things about it.
Was there, I mean as you said it was uploaded to a pirate board, did you find, even though
you're uploading it to a relatively obscure set of boards, did you find it coming back
to you in strange places, like running into it where you didn't expect it or running
into it?
I started seeing it on all the pirate boards, every board would have Tone Locke eventually
and then later when the internet came around, around 93 or 94, it was on some internet sites,
hacking sites, yeah the last version we actually released was in September of 94 and that's
the version that's still out there today.
If you had to describe the kind of boards that you were on in the early 90s, how would
you describe them?
In the early 90s, like 90 and 91, there were still a few public domain boards I was on
kind of moved toward the hacking boards and then 91, 92 more into the hacking freaking
boards, but only a couple of those, you know I just picked about two or three that I liked
and just stuck to those, so I wasn't on like all the boards or anything.
Well what made them good versus the others?
Just the people on it, I mean that's what makes a board good I think, it didn't matter
what they were running, I don't even remember what they were running, but the message groups,
you know people who you could meet, because I mean through like Scantronics was one board
I remember, I think it was from San Diego maybe, ran by a guy named Cludge and through
that board I made a couple of good friends that I ended up doing a lot of hacking stuff
with later.
Did you have a, I mean, the pirate BBS's at that point, I mean quote unquote the underground
BBS's, had a kind of a standoffish relationship with all the professional boards and all the
public domain boards and all the others, I mean do you have any memories of that, of
like, you know, keep that off here, keep our number out of the hands of the kids and don't
let anyone know where we are and stuff?
Yeah, they all wanted to be secret and elite, you know, a lot of boards, pirate boards had
a PD front, so they looked like a public domain board and if you had special access then it
was actually a pirate board.
One of my friends ran an Opus BBS, which nobody ran a pirate board off Opus, but he actually
ran a PD board, but if you had high enough access you got onto the pirate board and it
looked totally different.
A lot of pirate boards had, were designed to look like some obscure system, like an
old Unix system or whatever and then once you log in, you know, you get the pirate board.
Sometimes there are special passwords to get in and just to get access you might have to
answer some questions like, what does Cosmos stand for, you know, something like that.
I remember when I first got on Scantronics, I was going through the questionnaire and
had to answer some hacking questions and the Sysop Clutch just chatted me and I forgot
what he said, but he gave me access right away for some reason, might have been Tone
Locke, I don't remember.
If you had to describe what it was like, you know, what it was like to be on an underground
board, you know, like how did it feel, you know, like how did it, you know, what was
the, I guess what was the environment like, you know, what was the tone of the posting
or the people and...
Well I guess what made them really useful other than meeting, you know, just other hackers
and people you heard about and stuff was if you were scanning, for example, with Tone
Locke, whatever, you found a system that you didn't recognize, you would post like what
it looked like, post a login prompt and somebody else on there would have already come across
it and figure the whole system out and know, you know, the default passwords and know how
to run it, so you could post that and somebody would respond and give you the full deal,
maybe there's already a text file on it, you know, so that was really useful.
You could read through the message groups of other people's scans, there was a whole
message form called scans and, you know, if you recognized the system that they found,
you could help them out the same way, so that was one useful thing.
Now, going by your age, you were on these at a relatively young age, certainly the earlier
BBSs in the mid-80s, you were very young and even these, you were pretty young, did you
find that they, did you find yourself gravitating to the boards with other young people or was
it just whoever happened to be there, I mean, you know?
Yeah, I don't really care about the age, I mean, I think most people were a little bit
older than me, except for, well, my pirate friends were actually about a year younger
but the hacker people were a little bit older, it seemed like.
Do you think there's a reason why it attracts younger as opposed to just anybody?
Well, when you're 15 and 14, you don't have a car, you don't have a girlfriend, you got
nothing but time, right, especially during the summer, no school, so you've already got,
you know, 18 hours a day to just explore, you know, programming or hacking or whatever,
so I think that's why you see these kids, 15-year-old kids, you know, in Europe hacking
DVDs, I mean, thank God for those kids, right, because they don't have anything better to
do, no car, no girlfriend, that's just what they do, and then once they get a car and
a girlfriend, 17, 18, then, you know, they don't have as much time left to do that stuff.
Did you find that the case with yourself?
Yeah.
Actually, a lot of this stuff happened, I mean, at least I was long enough to drive,
but, you know, and I had to work and go to school, so I had less time, but, you know,
I didn't really get into, ever since I had seen War Games, of course, I was interested
in hacking, but I never met anybody, no other hackers, until, you know, 1990 or so, so,
you know, I was like 18 or 19 by the time I started meeting other people who were interested
in it.
Now, the time between War Games and writing a war dialer is a significant period of time,
almost 10 years.
Yeah, I mean, I guess I wrote Toneloke in 1991, the first version, and War Games, like,
83, I guess, it came out, so, I mean, there were plenty of War Dialers, obviously, there
was, oh god, what were they, do you remember, I forgot now, yeah, the old ones, there was
one in, like, Basic, I'm trying to remember the name, but, anyway, yeah, none of them,
they worked, kind of, but, they did, you know, none of them did random scanning, for one,
that was what Toneloke did differently, and none of them were as configurable as I wanted
to.
Yeah, certainly you have all these features that you pack into it, I mean, was this your
first time you'd written something like this, where you'd said, here's a function that
exists with computers, and I'm going to write a program that does that function even better
and more configured, or had there been other practice programs you'd written?
I had written some public domain software for some little utilities for quick BBS, really
small, stupid things, but this was, yeah, that was the first big one, you know, I'd
started writing that BBS, and I learned C doing that, and then Toneloke was in C, and
I got better at C, running Toneloke, so, but yeah, that was the first big program that
I'd written.
With running your own BBS, which is when, is that in the early 80s as well, or is it
much later?
Yeah, no, it's, okay, so I called my first BBS in 1984, and of course, then I wanted
my own, so I was living with my dad, and we had one phone line, and I set up a BBS, and
as soon as calls started coming in, my dad's trying to answer the phone, it's like, well,
you know, I told him I was running a BBS, so he made me take it down, obviously, so
that didn't work, so I couldn't run a BBS again until 1988, I put up my board, and I
had my own phone line at that point, so that was, yeah, that was my first, my own BBS,
I ran that for about a year and a half.
Do you remember the name?
Atlantis.
Do you have any strong memories about Atlantis?
I mean, I learned a lot doing it, you know, like, I got in, I had been doing basic programming
all along, but I got into more programming like Pascal and C at that point, I got more
interested in networking, my board was a FireNet board, and so I got interested in email and
all that stuff that, you know, I didn't even know about before, nothing, you know, the
board wasn't any spectacular as your average board, it had trade wars on it, people played
that all the time, so, yeah.
Now I assume your board, your time, is this a predates Legend of the Red Dragon, or is
that the same time too?
Legend of, what is that, I don't even, there you go, okay, it's a, it's a role playing
game, it is the single most thing, most common thing I am asked about, related to BBS's
of like, oh, you're going to cover Legend of the Red Dragon, right, it's essentially
a role playing game that has very well done ANSI screens, created by Seth Abel, whose
real name turns out to be Seth Abel Robinson, and I think it dates to 91, 92, okay, and
that was probably after my time as NPD Land.
Yeah, I mean, this is, it just becomes like the most beloved thing, but you know, you
have a lot of cases of that, of like, these very shared experiences over just a few programs,
which is, like I said, why I was so interested when, you know, I was able to get in contact
with the author of Tone Loke, because Tone Loke represents for a lot of kids their first
real, I mean, it's a tool that does this magical thing for you, right, it's like, it's a thing
you put on your computer that finds other computers, and that's a pretty major, major
deal.
Did you, I mean, did you have any competition at that point?
No, I mean, competition came around later, I think, like, there's one called THC Scan,
I think, that's a newer one, I think it might be Windows based, Tone Loke's DOS based,
people think DOS, you know, oh my god, but it actually runs it on Linux too, if you want.
There's some commercial ones, there's, like, Phone Sweep, if you wanted to pay $10,000
for it, it did the same thing as Tone Loke, but it wasn't written by a hacker, so, yeah,
it's worth $10,000, right?
Again, this is one, do you have any strong opinions on that perception of hackers and
underground VPSs, because certainly by the early 90s, they're really being demonized
until the internet shows up to take the heat away.
I mean, did you have any thoughts on that?
Nothing that, you know, that hasn't already been said before, I mean, the media, you know,
they're going to do what they want, they have their own agenda, and some of the people who
interviewed me, or at least one of the people, told me directly, because I was asking him,
I'm trying to fight this case, I have a First Amendment argument when I was banned from
the internet, and he's like, well, you know, I can cover that, but you have to understand
journalists are not your agent, you know.
We have our own agenda, and you never know what's going to happen at the end, you never
know what the spin's going to be, you know, so, I mean, that's no surprise to a lot of
people, but to people who, you know, maybe hackers who've gotten in trouble and they
aren't faced with the media trying to interview them, I guess that is a surprise to them when
the thing comes out on TV or in the magazine, and it looks different from what they expected.
You know, is there anything about hacker BBS's that you think hasn't really come out in terms
of like, you know, aspects of using it or what it was like that you think just doesn't
get covered because it's not interesting enough?
Like the old hacker boards, you mean?
That's too obscure an open question, it's a perfectly valid answer, by the way.
Yeah, I just, it's been so long, I haven't, you know, it's been ten years really since
hacker boards, so.
Certainly, I mean, that's, you know, that's all part of it, I mean, do you have any particularly
strong memories, good ones or bad ones from that time that you still remember?
I like, I mean, going to the hacker conventions, that wasn't really directly related to the
bullet boards, but all the same people you knew from the boards, you finally could meet
them, you know, in person, so that was fun, and, you know, get, drink and do crazy things.
Which cons?
I went, the first one I went to was Christmas Con or Ho Ho Con, because it was right in
Houston, close enough, and then went to Summer Con, and then the next Christmas Con, that's
all I've ever been to, I've never been to Hope or Def Con or any of those.
Well, and they really are different animals, by the way.
Well now there's 2,000 people.
5,000, that's the thing.
Yeah, I mean, the biggest one I ever went to was, I think, 200 or 300 people.
And the Summer Cons are still going on, actually.
Are they?
Yeah.
Yeah, there used to be like 20 people, you know, invite only.
I think I went to one that was actually invite only, but there were still like 100 people
there.
Big invitations.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, in describing those, I mean, what was the need to go, you know, what was,
what made you say, you know, why not, I'll go to this thing?
Well, Ho Ho Con was so close that I couldn't not go.
It was 200 miles away, you know, Houston.
And there was going to be people there from the boards I'd been calling that I'd never
met.
I hadn't met any other hackers in person.
Most of my friends local to me were more of the pirate type, where's dudes, and all the
hacker people I knew were in other cities.
So this was a chance to meet them in person.
And you know, after that, some of these people I started, you know, working more with on
hacking things and all kinds of things.
Let's see, as a sysop, like you said, it was a relatively short time, but we ever asked
to co sysop on other boards?
I don't think so.
Not that I can think of.
I mean, it would be a big deal because I mean, if you weren't a sysop, if you didn't have
your own board, it was a big deal to be a co sysop because I don't know, it was neat,
I guess.
If you already had your own board, who cares about another board, you know.
Did you have any, again, answer as much as you want to remember or care to, but I mean,
were you aware when the Sun Devil busts start happening and when, I mean, certainly in the
early 90s, a lot of boards are just now starting to be seized, busted and removed and taken
down?
Do you have memories from that time?
No, that was, I think it was 1990, at least the Austin Raids, and that was just before
I got into the scene, so I didn't know about it when it happened.
I knew about it, you know, a year or two later, you know, the Steve Jackson games raid and
I met, you know, some of the Austin people, Eric Bloodaxe was in Austin and I guess that
was the main one who I met.
But yeah, it was before my time, before I was into hacking, really.
Do you think that hacking and freaking BBSs were an important part or a side effect with
BBSs?
Do you have a, in the scheme of things, as you knew it, I mean, do you think they were?
Well, BBSs were just the way to meet other hackers, that was the main point.
You know, hacking by yourself, like I said, I was interested for like six years or more,
you know, I just, I didn't know what to do, I mean, I tried things, I scanned and I found
some HP 3000 system, I had no idea what it was, I tried everything, I probably spent
weeks on that system when, meanwhile, you know, probably five miles away you have the
mentor who knew everything about the system, but I didn't know the mentor.
And I remember I had given, I had print out of the system to somebody at school who was
on a hacker board and he posted it, got a response from somebody on the board with a
printout on exactly how to hack it and I was reading the message and it was from the mentor,
I didn't know who he was at that time, but years later I realized, hey, that's, you know,
same guy.
So I mean, I think that was the main, you know, things, BBSs were just a way to meet
other people so you could learn about the system you're trying to hack, you know, download
text files, download Frac, read about the system, you know, you found scanning.
Do you remember reading Mentor's Conscience of a Hacker?
Yeah.
I remember that.
It was all caps, wasn't it?
It's kind of weird.
Maybe one of the copies you got.
Okay.
It might have been converted, but yeah, I remember that.
Do you have any memories of it?
That was before I was, had really done any hacking, but I think it just made me want
to be a hacker more after reading it, I mean, it was, you know, I could relate to it.
What do you think makes a good BBS?
I think mostly just, you know, the people on it.
I mean, in the end, there were cool boards that had cool ANSI and, you know, 10 lines
and 300 gigs or whatever, I guess it was 300 megs back then, right?
But yeah, I mean, some of the best boards were just, you know, the cheesy software,
I don't even know what they're running.
It might have been black and white, you know, but the people on it, you know, the content,
the messages, yeah, that was, to me, what made a good board.
Did you end up affiliating with any groups?
Pirate groups, yeah, like when I was going through the pirate thing, I was with a group
called Public Enemy.
They were kind of, they were mostly Canadians and then most, like half in Canada and half
in Austin, I think, and people spread around, and I started out, I didn't have a fast enough
modem to be a courier, so I started just cracking games and then did some couriering, but that
wasn't really interesting, so that was it, and just my little phase through hacking.
Yeah, I mean...
I mean, pirating.
I mean, when, certainly by the early 90s, when you start having pirating, it's on a
whole different scale than the others.
I mean, I don't know if you ever ran into this phenomenon, the for-pay pirate BBSs that
were like a lot of money to be on.
Yeah, no, I mean, I couldn't understand why anybody would pay, but apparently they were
out there.
I do remember one thing.
This was sometime in 1988 to 1990 when I was into the public domain scene, I had the public
domain board, FidoNet, all that, and we had these monthly CTSA, Central Texas CISOPs Association
meetings, and Southwestern Bell was doing something where, because when you were a CISOP
and you had a phone line, it was used 24 hours a day, because your board was always busy,
so you were paying $15 a month for this phone line, but most people, they buy a phone line,
and they pay $15 a month, they don't use it that much per day.
So Southwestern Bell was trying to charge more money for CISOPs, for people who were
on boards, even though the deal was, you buy a phone line, you can use it as much as you
want.
And so the CISOPs ganged up and formed this thing called COSAR that was against that,
and we did things like, they had International Pulse Dial Month, I don't know how international
it really was, but the thing was, it costs Southwestern Bell less money to process touch
tones than it does to process pulse.
Do you remember pulse dialing?
Some people may not, but they would charge more for it, right?
So what the CISOPs did, they agreed for the whole month, whatever month it was, to use
nothing but pulse dialing, and to try to convince all their users to also do the same, to overload
Southwestern Bell circuits, just to prove that it costs you more to process pulse dialing
than it does for touch tone.
So that was like a little battle against the man.
Were you a member of COSAR?
Well, yeah, COSAR wasn't really official, you didn't have to join or anything, but
I did the pulse dialing thing.
I was a member of the CTSA.
I do know the COSAR thing.
The common belief is that the reason that they were actually going after CISOPs was
because they were going to implement a version of Minitel, and that they perceived that bulletin
boards were a direct threat.
So their theory was, let's destroy it, or price it out of existence, and get rid of
them.
And so they did this crazy thing.
And then this lawyer starts COSAR, and it gets huge, and they back off that, and there's
articles about them, and insulting stuff, and yeah, and that ultimately they do back
off.
It's one of the major triumphs, because a lot of the announcement goes over Phytonet
to do it.
Did you keep track much of the Phytonet politics?
Kind of, well, I mean, yeah, those people, they just loved the drama it seemed like.
I guess the internet was around, I didn't know anything about it, but kind of parallel
to Phytonet, except Phytonet was using all modems.
You had the echo mail, and the local Phytonet people, they met.
I was part of that, and I don't know, it was just very political, it seemed like.
The guy who was the hub for Austin, he had total control, like a dictatorship, and if
he didn't like you, you weren't going to get your mail, there's nothing you can do.
And he ended up not liking me much after a while, so I eventually, my board went down
for about a month, and you have a node number, which is like your identity, kind of like
your domain nowadays, and he assigned my node number to somebody else pretty quickly, you
know, which he was allowed to do, and so I lost it.
So yeah, Phytonet's full of politics, I don't even know, are they still around, are they
still doing anything?
Yes.
They're just an internet domain now, right?
No.
Something, phytonet.org, I mean, you can email.
The Denton Area Phytonet's Association is still meeting monthly.
Wow.
There, Steve Corrella is the current region coordinator for this area.
So Mike Masterson was the Austin hub, I don't know where he is today, but, you know, 1 colon
382 slash 1, you know.
Do you remember the PK ARC versus PK ZIP thing?
Yeah, I remember that.
That was a big deal.
What was your opinion of it?
Well, so the story I remember is C came out with ARC, a software company called C, with
this compression thing, ARC, and then Phil Katz came out with a better version of ARC,
did the same thing, but it was faster, I guess, and so they sued him, and then meanwhile he
was working on this new thing on the side called ZIP that was way better than ARC, faster,
smaller.
So by the time they won, and I think they did win in the end, everybody was using ZIP
because all the SysOps were against ARC, and so nobody used ARC anymore.
And that was, you know, like the small guy against the company, I don't think C was probably
that big at the time, but it seemed like it.
Did you, um, I mean, did you perceive any of the arguments going by or any of that stuff
with it?
I mean, any of the, did you feel a need to switch to get away from ARC?
I just thought ZIP was better, I mean, just for technically better, you know, faster and
smaller, that was really all I cared about.
What influence did War Games have on you?
It just made me want to, you know, pack, I guess, I mean, I don't know, you know, he
had dialed in and he wanted to play those games or whatever, and I didn't want to dial
in a NORAD, but you know, just anything, it didn't really matter.
Actually, I did want to change my grades, like everybody probably, and so I found some
War Dialer and started scanning my school, I didn't find anything, I don't even think
they had a computer at that time, but yeah, I'm in suspense, God, you know, six months
trying to do that, no luck, I ended up finding some system that the schools used to borrow
the film strips or something, so.
Well, that's something.
Something, not what I wanted.
Is there, is there, I keep separating your time with PBSs from the early 80s to the early
90s because the style of boards are different, I mean, you know, lots more speed, a larger
base of people, so there's like a greater expansion of them, you know, really between
those two, but is there anything about boards that you think people have lost knowledge
of, like, that just people just don't know and don't remember and that people who use
it now don't know and remember with the internet that you think they should know?
How long it took to load up a page, you know, 300 baud, I mean, you sit there and wait for
it to go like this, people don't know that, I mean, they think, I guess the webpages are
slow if you have a motive now, but, you know, you're getting images and all that, what else?
Yeah, I don't know, I mean, you have websites that are kind of message forums and kind of
a community, but a lot of boards were like a community, you know, everybody, you didn't
know each other in person, but you knew each other on the board, and I don't know, nothing
specific though.