Hell ya! 1983 was when I got my C64 300 baud "Automodem" -- autodial (pulse)/autoanswer, totally the way to go! (I remember in '81 being jealous of those who had spent the $500 or so on a Livermore Star acoustic 300)
I was the terror of the local boards -- most of which had freaks (not phreaks -- I guess statute of limitations means I can admit to that for a very brief period) as Sysops.
The local BBS scene was:
A. Some well-meaning guy who ran a decent, low-profile BBS.
B. Some Bobn-class moron who had a trash-80 wired to 6 different types of floppy drives, had a "second personality" he swore was real (only a US MArshal, so he was out of town whenever anybody visited), and who printed out full logs of everybody's sessions (included priv. email)
C. Another Bobn-class moron who hated B, required snail-mail requests to get on his board. In flamewars with B, he created his own second personality, allegedly "A deaf friend of C; C is really nice and helps me set up my board"
D. An alcoholic, who called his site "Friends of Bill W."
I screwed around with these, mostly inciting trouble -- I met B. at his house (with his equally horribly obese wife); they lived blocks away. He claimed a marines formation; I doubted it -- I mean, no matter how low you might think of the marines, this guy was below that. He had a bunch of yap dogs he claimed had full-size jaws, but all they did was run and dump on the carpet (his house rule: 'you step in it, you clean it up'). Then I got a phone number for a BBS in Berkeley I had overheard discussions about in some silly College-Level 6502 programming course taught by grad students at Berkeley over the summer. That got me into "the wrong crowd", as the feds would say.
I finally stopped when I gave a complementary call to the 38-year-old former boomer dude with a wife and kids for a new Cserve password, and his wife answered, "He's out of jail, but he's not here right now."
Fortunately, that's all behind me, back when I was a minor. Although from time to time, I still get misty-eyed about the days when long distance was a dialup (local or 800) and a six-digit code. SIX DIGITS. You know, if you have 50,000 clients, 1 in 20 works?
I was young and stupid; man I'm glad I survived that to warn kids not to pull that toejam.
