In AOL Instant Messenger when I was in middle school I bulk messaged a ton of accounts in some teen chat saying “Hi Sarah.” Most of them responded “I’m not Sarah” or similar but a few replied “who is this?” I said “It’s Josh.” Most of them said “I don’t know a Josh” but one of them said “Hi” like she knew a Josh. I then started talking to her and slowly got around to telling her that I had a crush on her. She actually seemed interested and she said she was going to come over to my house to talk about it. Don’t know how that ended but I hope it’s like your story.

I had many 'randoms' added on MSN messenger. Usually acquired through everyone inviting his complete contact list to one conversation. We used to discuss all and sundry back then.

I was always slightly more nervous messaging the girls (obvious from their elaborate emoticon-saturated screen names).

Curiously, one of my friends had a contact named '[email protected]' who was always online but never replied.

I sometimes wonder how many of them are doing now.

> Usually acquired through everyone inviting his complete contact list to one conversation.

Man, those were the days... Most of my contacts disappeared one by one (except for 2 which are my oldest friends now!), and it seems like that kind of atmosphere (just adding random people to chat) doesn't exist anywhere anymore, does it?

Smaller Discord servers are close

+1

Some of my favorite random people I’ve met, I met playing in various games then gave them my Discord channel.

Good, good times.

Back at MIT I had a script that would use "finger" to check who was logged into various machines on Athena clusters (MIT public computers) and occasionally send Zephyr messages to two adjacent people, one saying "look to your right" and another saying "look to your left" causing the two people to look at each other.

I like to think a lot of inadvertent introductions and friendships might have been created by the script.

This is great. It’s like the nobler version of trolling.

This is wholesome hacking :)

I’m a bit older and when I was about 14 or 15 I got into assembly language DOS virus writing. This was in 1992 and 1993. It’s actually how I learned x86 ASM. I was involved with an old school hacking (sense 2) group called Phalcon/Skism. Did other fun stuff like “wardialing” with a program called ToneLoc.

Anyway I wrote some viruses and dropped them in my high school computer lab. Several ended up getting loose on the local Cincinnati area BBS scene. One ended up in McAfee antivirus pretty quickly so I assume it spread further. There was basically zero security to stop such things back then.

None of my viruses were designed to do real damage. They would print stupid messages or change your color scheme to funky colors, stuff like that.

This was back when hacking (sense 2) and the computer underground was about a mix of pranks and exploration. It’s not like today where it’s all about serious crime and espionage and the penalties are also serious. It’s definitely not fun anymore.

This reminds me of when I first discovered the Win32 API and used it to write some silly annoying apps in Borland C++ Builder. This was around 1998 and the worst I ever came up with was a persistent pop up that was difficult to remove due to some registry obfuscation. It had a single button that would open the CDROM tray. I put it on every computer in the lab. Good times. You’re right—it used to be playful to hack around. I miss those days.

We played a lot of counter strike during my uni days and at one point I created a prank program that disguised itself as system.exe and listened for mouse movement. It would then inject random but smooth error into the mouse movement. I installed it on a friend's PC and it drove him to white hot rage. I think he destroyed a couple of mice before I owned up and bought him a new high end Logitech laser mouse (which was a novel thing at the time).

That's clever and awesome, in the true spirit of hacking.

I just wanted to write it was a crime still back then and take the example of the first worm in 1988 : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm TIL: a Harvard student named Paul Graham was quite close to Robert Morris. It is a small world.

you might be interested in seeing the founders of yc https://www.ycombinator.com/people/

Immediately searched for dang when I saw there were portraits there. He seems to be the only one who doesn't show his face!

The ghost in the shell

I never really looked at this page before. Wow, I still kind of think of YC as a small company but the reality is that they have more employees than I thought.

Have you ever happened upon the youtuber danoct1? He plays with old DOS and Win32 viruses.

https://m.youtube.com/user/danooct1

Perhaps one of yours has been featured!

Upvoted. Whoever downvoted you has likely never attended certain universities, and clearly has never been in the military. Doing things that are wrong and fun while still being harmless requires creativity.

For it being called hacker news this place is very conventional. It’s better than /r/programming though.

Burning a 0-day exploit on changing people's backgrounds or color scheme would be a good bit in 2021

There just was little to no security back then. The entire system was a permanent zero day.

Computers were mostly not networked so the threat surface was small, and like I said most hackers in the sense I described were pranksters. Big money and power was just not in it unless you were going after serious specialized targets, and there were less of those and they were pretty much all air gapped.

Air gap was the only real security back then. Just don’t connect it and guard it physically.

Cincinnati was a lot of fun in those days. I was nearby, though most of my "hacking" friends were in Cincy.

Ever meet a guy who went by PADMaster?

No, but there was quite a 2600 group around here back then. A big “elite” (slang of the time) BBS scene too.

And here I thought I was funny when I renamed the internal DOS command “dir” to “duh” on my boss’s computer.

This made my day.

That is a beautiful anecdote

Kris?

Isolde?