There's a MUD I used to be into back in the day (it's actually still online, and my characters still exist!), and I got several of my friends into it. Unfortunately, most of us didn't have internet at home and could only play it in the school lab.
This was a fairly rural area, and it was the mid 90s. CompuServe and AOL existed, but local access numbers did not - long distance was still quite expensive, and internet time was strictly monitored and enforced even if you were using your infinite free hours on your 12th AOL screen name.
In about '97, a local ISP set up a dial-up point of presence in our town, so the long distance problems were solved. Whoo! However, some of my friends had parents who weren't on board with this whole "internet fad" and so remained offline.
Little shit that I was, I figured out that if you used a terminal client to dial the ISP's number instead of the dial-up networking client, you'd land in a shell; that typically wasn't supposed to happen. Hmmm.....
Normally that console shouldn't even be accessible via the customer dial-up number, but it gets better. You didn't have to authenticate to access that shell, either; just dial the number, wait about 5 seconds after the handshake completes (it's expecting you to start a PPP session at that point), and bam, you land in a shell. From that shell, you could telnet to anywhere on the internet, including the MUD server.
I'm not exactly sure what piece of telecom equipment acted as our game server for so many years, but I want to say it was the router connected to the modem bank. Whatever it was, it was misconfigured in a very advantageous way.
Once I figured that out, the six friends I'd gotten into that MUD were all set as well as a few more people they brought in. HyperTerminal was no zMUD for sure, but it was better than not playing at all.
Looking back, I kinda feel like an ass now. That modem bank was fed by two T1s, one for the modems, and one for the data backhaul, and could support up to 24 simultaneous connections.
It was very common to get the "all circuits are busy now" error message on most days. Making things worse, almost half of the total capacity was us playing MUDs without even being subscribers to the ISP (well, I was, but still).
That worked up until about 2002 when that small ISP was bought out by the local telco who apparently had their equipment configured correctly.
wow that takes me back!
back in the early to mid 90s, I was also into MUDs - (this one mostly, realmsofdespair.com, but some others that used the same codebase). I was really into computers and then the town got access to the Internet in 1993 - the school got it in 1994. in 1995, one of my friends (who I had introduced to MUDs) landed a TA spot at the school's library, more as a "helper" when it came to computers so the actual librarian wouldnt have to learn anything - she was cool but reeeeeally old, and not a luddite but the closest thing to it (she had a giant hardon for the dewey decimal system).
so - and my memory is really hazy since this was close to 30 years ago - there was this browser that had DUN (dial up networking) built into it - maybe mosiac or a really early version of netscape. I forget. I had figured out that it didnt hash the password, so I passed a copy of it off to my friend and he put it on all of the library's computers, then got the librarian to "set up" the library's various accounts on those computers.
lol. back in those days, access to the internet was metered per hour - I want to say we'd get 40 or 50 "free" hours every month with the basic package - enough for my parents to check their email or download clipart so my sister could print up banners on the printer, but for hardcore gamers the basic internet package was like offering a canteen of water to someone lost in the desert. woefully, even criminally insufficient. heh, criminally...
but the school had an education package so it was unlimited!! my group of friends ended up racking up, easily, hundreds of hours of internet access each month on the school's dime, and we did that for a few years. free internet - basically unheard of, at the time. the passwords would occasionally get changed but the librarian never wanted to learn computing so nothing ever got "fixed". eventually she retired and they hired someone who at least knew enough to institute a modicum of security. by then I already had a dedicated phone line for my computer and an unlimited access account.
ah, fun times.