Hi Bumper,
good stuff!!
The commodore stuff got me 'memberin ...twas about 1983 or 1984ish and I had just gotten my first modem, I believe it was a 300/1200 baud modem. I was a member of a local 'hacker' group, this was before such teminology was taboo and it was more of a user group that shared software and ideas... anyway I got a hold of a dialer that allowed you to enter a dialing prefix and it would run calls to each number from xxx-0000 through xxx-9999 to determine what lines had modems connected to them and then create a log of sucessful connections for review at a later date. Well I threw in all of the local prefixes, all 5 of them and let 'er rip, it took about a week or so running at night. I did not really fully comprehend what I had just done until I got my phone bill. In those days there was no unlimited calling plans...or if there were I certianly didnt have one. Well I got a bill from my phone company for about $2300, not including long distance charges which were about $35. On receipt of the bill, once I got over my "holy crapoly what did I do", I called the phone company and "questioned the charges" with my fingers crossed, prepared to explain my stupidity, fortunately I did not even have to. Once the rep took a look at my account they immediately determined that there was, "No way that could be accurate, there must be something wrong with the billing system and would it be ok if they just billed my number the same as last month plus long distance, since the mistake only seemed to affect local calls" I, of course, quickly agreed that seemed like a reasonable solution and much to my relief I got a "corrected bill" a few days later which I paid immediately.
I guess I can identify that as the specific moment when I could no longer deny that I was a geek with nothing latent about it.
btw: I still remember the log file as having 27 connections, out of 50,000, of which about 1/2 were banks, the rest were mostly members of my local user group.
thanks for bringing up the memories! Havent thought about it in a while.
bba2