retrocomputing

Love this!

I also have a MUD story... back in 1993 I lived in Brazil, and there were no commercial ISPs, so you couldn't have internet even if you wanted to pay for it. Only universities were connected to the internet.

A friend of mine was in college studying computer science, and he had a "special number" that he could dial to get access from home. The number was unlike any other I've seen before. He shared the login ("students") and password ("students93") with me, and told me I could use it sparingly.

I was 15 at the time, and I started playing a MUD. The first day I played for 30 minutes. The second day, for a couple hours. Soon I was spending 8 hours a day playing MUD, and I started dreading the phone bill. Long distance calls where super expensive back then in Brazil, and even a landline would cost as much as a car!

After a month, no bill came. I waited another couple weeks, and I finally decided to call the phone company and ask how much it would cost to call the "special number".

"Sir, this number doesn't exist", was the answer.

Well, it worked for me! I kept using it, playing that MUD for 8-12 hours every day. Eventually, when 1994 arrived, my password stopped working. I tried "students94" and I was in. I only had telnet and ftp access, but that was enough to play MUDs and discover a whole new world.

Eventually in 1995 the password stop working again, and trying "students95" didn't work. I started using BBSs, and eventually ran my own for a few months. In 1996 I went to college, and the first commercial ISP opened in the city where I was. I was one of their first clients.

I love this story. Also, TIL Avatar is still around. We had a build (or something really similar) running on one of our college servers and it got hacked into the ground / used as a staging area to hack other things.

I have a similar story. Back in the 90's I'd go to the library and one of the terminals available auto dialed and logged into gopher (being that this was MN and gopher was home grown). One of the menu options eventually ended me up at another college that had muds in its telnet link sections. But you couldn't really sit and monopolize a terminal at the library. I did see though the phone number written on the modem. So I dialed it from home with my 2400 baud modem. It would just land me at a > prompt. No regular commands worked. But I had remembered that the gopher server was consultant.micro.umn.edu . So I typed that in at the prompt and voila I was connected. The curses client for gopher loaded up the mother gopher site. I found my way to that college with the mud list and played quite a bit. Later I discovered by accident I could just ^C out of the curses client and be dropped to a limited privilege command shell. but it had telnet. So I could just go straight to the muds.

Later I learned from the U of MN gopher site that I could get an alumni account for a few bucks a month. Well, they offered alumni accounts anyway. I hadn't actually attended. I printed out the paper form and mailed it in, just checking the box that said I was an alumni. apparently they didn't check if I actually was, because from then on I had an alumni account. Which didn't really give me anything new except an email address. And I could "officially" dial in like I had been. but I felt like I should at least be paying something.

Awesome support mate, thanks for sharing!

Great story, thanks for sharing! 😊

takes notes please don't do this to 2600.network - and if you do, tell me please.

Awesome story, thanks for sharing. Takes me back to the day.

This is epic! Thanks for sharing!

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.