Very sad story. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/07/serial-swatter-who-cause...

Compuserve also had different rates depending on the baud rate you connected at.

Having a computer and getting online was a pretty expensive hobby in the 80s and early 90s.

That username should be permanently retired and the 18 year old prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law for crimes which the law would or could hold him or her accountable.

A lot of us used SLMR (silly little mail reader) instead as it was cheaper than blue wave.

double is_computer_on_fire();

Returns the temperature of the motherboard if the computer is currently on fire. Smoldering doesn't count. If the computer isn't on fire, the function returns some other value.

( https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/bebook/TheKernelKit_Sys...)

Tymnet was interesting. It was a virtual circuit-switched system for keyboard terminals. There was a central control machine, and a bunch of dumb switching nodes. The central control machine (an SDS-945 originally) would set up a route and send out "route channel 24 to channel 57" commands to each node. The nodes just forwarded packets per the set route. If the control machine went down, all routes stayed working, but new ones could not be set up. There was a second control machine that could take over if needed.

Nodes had a queue for each virtual circuit, and flow control. It wasn't end to end raw packets. In the days of expensive long haul bandwidth, this was essential. Pure datagram networks only work because our long-haul connections today have huge bandwidth. Datagram networks can't really handle congestion in the middle of the network. Virtual circuit networks can. Which is why, in the early 1970s, it looked like virtual circuit networks were the future. Even the original ARPANET had node to node flow control.

The Tymnet "backbone" was originally only 2400 to 4800 baud, so they had major lag problems. To help with this, they used local echo when possible, so local typing didn't lag. You'd type in a line, and at the end of the line, the whole line went across the network. The connection could shift from local to remote echo seamlessly.

(Telnet, for the Internet, can do local echo, too, but Berkeley didn't put that in their BSD Telnet, so it fell out of use as network bandwidth increased. That worked in pre-BSD UNET, and echo would be local until you used some program, such as "vi", which enabled "raw mode".)

Here's a summary of the Tymnet technology.[1]

[1] http://cap-lore.com/Tymnet/TOCN.html

Access to some of the X.25 networks was easily hacked, as there was almost no cybercrime back then outside of teenagers. In some cases, there was only a logon code - no password at all. I remember a network where the code was just a short-ish number, so it could be easily mined via brute-force search. The modem bank would disconnect you after X failed attempts, but you could just dial back in right away (there was no caller ID either.)

X.25 had hosts called Outdials in most area codes that would let you make a local modem call back out for no extra charge, as long as it was toll-free. [2] This was a way to avoid expensive long-distance BBS calls, particularly if you were using a mined X.25 logon. The latency was pretty bad but the connection could be much more reliable than a modem on a noisy long-distance line.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.25

[2] https://github.com/maestron/hacking-tutorials/blob/master/Ba...

what up fellow olds