Greetings

[eric52]

Hello, I'm Eric, born in '52 and a computer addict. Hacked my first bank in '69 on a teletype tied into Dartmouth's Kiewit Computation Center. Changed a file of standard reply strings to wise cracks hinting at AI, and never even thought about the money. I still don't. Present obsession is fractal art on a huge variety of rebuilt discards. I prefer Linux, but I'm experienced in Windows, and I even have a few Apples to annoy myself with. I guess now I'll add some audio tracks to the visuals I've been staring at and lace in some nootropics and legal herbs. I suppose i-dosing means I'm trying to rejoin society. Retirement is weird!

[michel333alfa]

Did you really hack a bank? lmao

[eric52]

Yeah, I really did. There were 13 dedicated users to a group of mainframe files. One seemed to be a test account, but the others were banks testing the new tech. The system ran on interpreted BASIC time-shared by teletypes. You had to LIST to see your program. Anyhow, 3 of us found a bunch of canned $TRING responses and giggled like the kids we were changing them for shock value. We found a lot more, but that's all we touched. I'm quite sure it worked because Dartmouth freaked out. So did our school. Big investigation. No one was caught, because no one had really thought of security. and there were no tracking protocols. The only true lead they had was the childishness of the prank. So I got to graduate and went on to assembly language, becoming obsolete at the 286/386 mark. Now I just mess around with tinker toys, and I have to use Google to manage that. I've never broken the addiction, and I still play around with QB64. Every once in a while, I giggle.