Re: Hacker Handle

[a2aviator@gmail.com]

The Cold War killed the BBS Star.

Some bits and bytes from the past.

Micromodem ][ ... Microcoupler. Oh the days.

On a never ending quest to seek out new philes,
Avoid legal harrasment and boldly pirate what
no man has pirated before.

Apple-Cat ][ .. did you know that the Apple Cat Music Synthesizer
worked on the Micromodem ][ also? It didn't sound nearly as good. But
you could hear it coming out of the Microcoupler, The reason for the
Microcoupler in those days was because anything that attached to the
Bell System had to be approved. So D.C. Hayes & Associates made one
interface and every host adapter just used the same thing. No need to
get each thing certified for connection to the Bell System Network. It
set D.C. Hayes apart and gave them the edge that lasted many years in
the modem market.

Then came the Micromodem //e, after 1984 and the Bell System Bustup. No
central authority to require squat. Thank MCI, Microwave Communications
Incorporated for that one. Ironic..

"PC Pursuit" 1.0 was basically MCI codes. dial your local access port.
In my case, 721-4100 --- and enter your 5 digit code. (Woowie!! 5
digitz!!!) .and get this, for 4 years plus a few months, the local MCI
port worked on a rather lame simple code. 00001 .. yes. So you dial up
7214100,,,00001,9164483402 ..and you were on your way..

The whole other thing was to get codes for these access ports. That
basically involved a process much like War Games Dialing. Though way
more popular prior, it never really had a term until the movie. I
remember a high profile (at the time) court case about some kids
'hacking' (nothing like the 'real' thing.. ) and the Judge actually
said something along the lines of "I've see War Games. This is very,
very dangerous behavior"... and handed down a max. sentence to some
young kids for getting a password to a school attendance system.

This involved basically dialing your local port, dialing a proper
length  code and then a known good BBS # so that if the BBS answered
the code used must in fact be valid. Go figure.

Well, with Sprint's system and an Apple-Cat II, gee, the 'Cat was the
modem to have..  anyhow, with an Apple-Cat II, Sprint was easier prey.

Since the 'Cat was very sensative and could pick up on all kinds of
tones and line conditions/switches. the Sprint code hacker that ran on
an Apple-Cat didn't even need to dial an actual BBS to know if a code
was bad, but it was a good idea to stay on the line and verify it just
in case.

The name of the program was the Sprinting Cat. How the Sprinting Cat
worked was pretty cool. Sprint used 7 digit codes, more possibilities
than MCI. Sprint was also known as the one that would trace your call
and gitcha.. So the Sprinting Cat would dial the code and if it was an
invalid code the Sprint system would emit a slight click that was
barely audible, almost like the ProDOS 'fart'. The 'Cat would hear it
and just dump the line and fire off another code. Sprint would just
allow you to retry the code, though this was not written up, it worked
this way though. So.. The Sprinting Cat, because it could fire off code
after code and then finally, to tick/click- it dialed the BBS and
waited for the carrier. Bingo, got a code.

before this, though- the AE Line. The AE Lines generally had a name but
most were just known by their password. You got a prompt, you entered
the password. There was only one. You would find a post on a BBS, that
said this AE line had this program up, it would be up for 48 hours, and
you had to get it before then. But see, there was a catch.

The catch was Disk Splitter was just that, a splitter. Disk Splitter
would split up the disk into 5 parts. This was so you could download a
self loading disk that did not have a catalog track. Otherwise those
files would simply be made available. The catch was Disk Splitter had
no compression function.

So you called and saw a catalog that looked like this:

DISK VOLUME 254

B  120 ]PART01
B  120 ]PART02

... etc.

Remember, no compression... a disk being 560 sectors and having track
11 taken up by a catalog track plus the first three tracks taken up by
DOS meant you wre minus 64 sectors right there. So you could fit 4 of
the ]PARTs on the disk. Then the next day you put up the ]PART5.

Some AE lines would put up a ware a day for a week and on the weekend
put up all the ]PART05s named by date or such and all one had to do was
rename them to reassemble.

Oh the day that a new version of Disk Splitter came, the one that asked
you what you wanted to name the file. 5 characters, but at least it was
something.

The BBSs of the day were mostly highly modified Networks ][ based
systems, I always wondered if Nick Nameo(sp) ever sold very many copies
of that. All the 'Public Domain' BBSs of the day ran PMS. Peoples
Message System. Boy did that thing blow.

A newcomer on the scene was GBBS and GBBS had the best Apple-Cat
driver. All the BBSs that ran on GBBS   O$="Had an Apple Cat modem and
some were even 1200 baud" : GOSUB 7000

Networks II, GBBS and PMS were the beginnings of the A2 BBS scene.

The AE lines were in their own league, and then there were the CATSends
and Cat-Fur lines.

The Apple-Cat modem had a special trick in the day. Half duplex 1200
baud. That is, one side of the conversation screamed at 1200 baud, the
other came back at 300/450 baud. The Disk-Fur line was like the AE only
different in that it just answered the phone and as long as another
Apple-Cat was calling it, once they established connection the host
would just send whatever disk was inserted in the disk drive at the
time.

So the Sysop just ran the Disk-Fur program, when it said waiting for
call, put in the desired disk to distribute and then called a BBS and
posted "The Print Shop is available on the Black Bag Disk-Fur line
until March 3rd. What took most of 3-4 hours happened in 45 minutes or
less with the Apple-Cat and 202.

Before BBS's had file sections they were separate entities from the
warez lines. AE/Disk-Fur and later on, Cat-Send/Cat-fur were more like
AE in that they did files and had a mini command shell.

BBSs were primarily 300 baud, one could say the biggest explosion to
date was with the proliferation of 300 baud. Yes, that means modems
were slower before that. The personal computer was not really part of
it, but what people were doing with personal computers and BBSs was
nothing totally new. 1200 baud was rare, you had to be rich, well,
richer- to have a 1200 modem and they were generally external. A 1200
baud BBS was even more rare.

The advent of the BBS with a file transfer area was with the first time
someone decided to put up the two of them combined, the BBS and AE Pro.
Seeing something like "Middle Earth BBS/AE" meant just that. You call
in, do your messaging and email and then select G)oto AE line instead
of  hanging up. You were then told to wait while some stuff happened
and poof, AE Pro prompt. Most of them had no password because the
password was your login to the BBS. But some did ask for a password
again. Mostly because to get the AE to run and *not* kill an existing
connection was a  hack within itself. A function of most BBSs and AE
too was when they were starting up again to initialize the modem. That
meant making sure it was on hook.

Some even combined all three, "MisChip's Socket BBS/AE/Cat-Fur".

I was one of those. I had an 8 inch platter based Corvus drive with 10
disk drives on a BBS for a couple years. Then the hard drive became the
sole storage method for a while.  /<-Mart BBS/AE/Cat-Fur. 714-433-4653.

After a while 300 baud kinda got kicked to the curb. For the longest
time I refused to follow that but at one point I did give up on 300
baud in the transfers.

A cool trick was also to use the Apple Cat 202 mode on the BBS side of
things. Any output would spit at 202, so you would see a BBS with a
listing like 300 - 1200/202 or 103/202/212.

Along came 2400 and everyone swore that 1200 was barely possible and
never in our lifetimes would we see anything more. It was in those days
that if you had a noisy phone line and complained to the local telco it
usually resulted in "you'll have to upgrade to a data service" but then
you wouldn't have dialtone. There was no 'internet' for us. It was
there, it was another "not in your lifetime" kinda thing.. now for us
it's Internet II. ;)


..and I jumped around there, after Disk Splitter came a version that
had compression but that didn't last long. The first version of DDD
showed up. Dalton's Disk Disintegrator. The first version actually did
like Disk Splitter and made multiple files, later on the files were
only multiple if a certain size was reached and finally the familiar
single file;

B 459 SUMMER GAMES II<#BEEF>

... and fast fowarding some- Al Gore came and killed the BBS's.. you
see, he knew he wanted to be a politician on a high level some day. So
he knew that if he got rid of these underground BBS's now, you know,
where 'those kids' could find plans to make a nuclear bomb (yes, a text
phile was floating around.. while it was correct in principal..) .. and
how to make your own thermite, you know ... "They" had no idea what was
on BBSs..

Wanna laugh about BBS's? Think the Internet is 'bad' now?

Do some Google on "Montana Wildhack" and the BBSs... 600 toilets.. and
thats nothing.

Anyway, back t Al Gore. So you see, if Al Gore invented something to
kill all these BBSs.. .. ;-)


.... only this 'invention' is only a larger can of worms...


This by all means is not complete, could have been longer even.. I'll
save that for a later time.


My big thing was that Skyfox worked with the Mockingboard, Rescue
Raiders actually had Mockingboard coded back in along with the crack,
as  it's packing said Mockingboard support but infact the game did
nothing with the Mockingboard. The code was broken.

Archon, the level 7 sorcerer spell casting bug was fixed with the crack
from us too.  

...end Of phile...

NO CARRIER