I have somehow found myself doing a lighthearted talk on retro hacking this Wednesday. Would anyone here happen to know anything about it?
I have somehow found myself doing a lighthearted talk on retro hacking this Wednesday. Would anyone here happen to know anything about it?
80s was all about the phones. And not much different than it is now.
If you want to know what hacking is like in the 80s watch Wargames and look up three dudes:
If you want to know what hacking was like in the 90s watch Sneakers and look up
I dunno, having payphones on every other street corner in the 80’s-90’s can seem like a foreign concept today.
My dad and his buddy devised a plan to get unlimited calls from phone booths to abroad. They drilled a 2 Deutschmark coin and put a fishing line through it. They figured out that the coin only drops after the allotted time is up, allowing the machine for there to be credit registered. But there was nothing preventing the coin from going upwards again. So they just kept pulling it out and then inserting the coin again. And re-dialing the international number. Like some petty comic book villains.
Phone phreaking, the 80’s were so fun. Stolen AT&T calling card numbers enabled you to call long distance for free at a time when calling the next city over could cost 30 cents a minute or more (equivalent to over a buck now). Hacking people’s answering machines was pretty easy. For youngsters, this was a device hooked up to your land line phone to give you voicemail. You could listen to your messages remotely by calling it and entering a password which was very short and limited to numbers. Some had to the capability to change the message that answered the phone. That made for lots of fun
30 cents per minute in the 80’s is like a dollar per minute today, maybe more.