When We Was Fab

Steven Vaughan-Nichols has an article entitled “Before the Internet: The Golden Age of Online Services.” It’s a little stroll down memory lane for folks who were connecting online before the web; mainly reviewing the major online services like AOL, Prodigy, and Compuserve. The world was at your fingertips if you had a 300 baud modem and many dollars per hour.

I was a teen and in college during those days and so didn’t have the money, or really, the need for those services. Although, the lack of a broadly available Internet 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 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.