I'm reading through these old textfiles, completely blown away. I was also in the 914 area code, with the absurd little handle King Kilroy (like most of the handles, it didn't make much sense or have any meaning, but we were all stuck with one), and I also called Sherwood Forest all the time. As I remember it, that was the best of the 914s. Then I remember discovering the "war games dialers" (then called something else, since the movie war games hadn't come out yet) and getting my first batch of sprint codes and so being able to call outside the 914 area code, and calling..... can't remember most of them. I remember a really good one in the 617 area code called Xavier or something like that, one of the earlier ones with a harddrive, a whopping 10 megs. I went so far as to sell the damn codes in the line in my school cafeteria, calling them "payphone codes". It seemed like a great deal to sell a hacked calling card code for a ham sandwich. Luckily that didn't catch on beyond just a few friends. I remember my father getting nervous when our phone bill went from astronomical to minimal even while I was using the thing five times as often, calling, as he knew, five times as far. Then I got the pivotal second phone line, so it was trading goofy atarisoft games all night over the applecat modem, which went at a blazing 1200 buad, which as everyone knew was the terminal speed for a modem, the fastest speed theoretically possible. It strikes me as intersting that instead of email we used voice messages or, since this was before even answering machines, regular old phone tag, at least when the person's line wasn't busy for hours and hours, since this was even before call waiting. Then I remember the dreaded advent of ESS, when suddenly all phone calls could be easily traced. No more making conference calls with every friend I could think to call, and no more war games dialing, or at least much less. Even calling TSS to get the credit ratings of my parent's friends got a little harder. Then that damn article "Night of the Hackers" in Newsweek, and suddenly everyone was getting arrested, or at least everyone said everyone was getting arrested. I re-read that article last year, and there's a line in it something like "you're constantly reminded how young these people are", and I'm sure it was true, but at the time it seemed like we were prime players in some sort of international espionage drama. Then Newsweek printed the sequel, "Return of the Night of the Hackers", detailing how the author had been deluged with hundreds of mailorder toilet seats and crap like that, then at the end of the month getting billed for all of it on his credit card. That's pretty much when I left the scene so I don't know what happened next. 1985? Anyway, thanks for the amazing archive, I still have shivers. King Kilroy Now for equally absurd reasons called: Hugh Mann http://wrybread.com