Today, I’ll go with the Internet. It’s really hard to remember how I did things before it came along. This is a tool that I was, perhaps, waiting for more eagerly than most. When I was 14, I got arrested for a crime the Internet has rendered obsolete. I was stealing phone calls from a local long distance company called Saverline. It worked like MCI or Sprint (like they did at the time, anyway). If you were a customer, you dialed their switchboard number, dialed your long distance number, and then (here is the crack security) dialed your *four* digit code. I (and a number of my fellow Commodore 64 users) would keep dialing until we got a working four digit code. I’d use the number to call long distance to connect to a Bulletin Board System in other cities. I really enjoyed the discussion boards on those systems, but we also used the systems to download games (“warez”). I was also the sort of kid who was likely to pore over encyclopedias and the like when I got my hands on them.
The instant access to so much information and social interaction really is incredible. My kids are going to have no concept of a world without an Internet. They’ll be slightly amazed when I tell them tales of Before; much as I did when mom would tell me that there was a period of time when her family did not have a television.
[…] was a significant cause of one of the formative events in my life. I’ve told the story before of my misspent youth: Today, I’ll go with the Internet. It’s really hard to remember how I did […]