Seems like only yesterday I was checking payphones for dialtones. I learned about the phreak scene on bbs boards as a kid in the 80s. Still the definition of a hacker in my mind.

Being the youngest of five, I had to fight for phone access so 2600 had a much higher bandwidth for me. :)

Good memories. It was such a treat to have my parents drop me in a Barnes and Noble and pick up 2600, crawl into a comfy corner and spend a few hours reading what I only could only partially even grasp. Luckily there were so many other resources you could wander an aisle over to the comp sci section and access.

Abbie Hoffman and the Anarchists Cookbook were also a few shelves down, and yet here we are worried about kids on the internet, its harder now to come across these topics "accidentally" that it was in the library nerding out.

All the worlds info is now accessible theoretically, yet I feel it's somehow harder to discover anything novel than it was back then, especially for the young.

I met a lot friends at Barnes & Noble back in the day.

I'm still friends with most of them!

99th karma. Thank you for that.

The last paragraph reminds me a little of the short story The Library of Babel. Where all possible permutations of ‘knowledge’ is available and it all becomes useless/impossible to find.