- First Contact Chapter 1: First Contact Nobody just walked into the scene. You didn't see ads in Computer Shopper magazine that said "Join the Underground Today!" There was no website to visit, no application to fill out. The scene found you, or more accurately, you stumbled into it through a combination of curiosity, technical skill, and dumb luck. For me, it started with a Commodore 64 and a 300 baud modem in 1985.
I was fourteen, living in suburban nowhere, and absolutely obsessed with this beige box that could somehow talk to other computers over the phone line. My entire setup lived in a closet in my brother's basement - I had a whole apartment down there, and the closet became my system farm. The C64, the modem, the drives - all crammed in there. Self-contained crime in a closet.
It wasn't glamorous, but it was mine, and from that space, I could reach anywhere in the world that had a phone line. The first BBS I ever called was completely legit - some local thing run by a computer club where people traded programming tips and argued about which computer was better. At first, my BBS usage was pretty normal. I'd log into local systems, read the message boards about computers and technology, maybe download a game or utility program.
I followed the rules, maintained good upload/download ratios, and participated in discussions about legitimate topics. Like most teenage computer enthusiasts, I was fascinated by the technology itself - how BBSes worked, how modems connected, how sysops managed their systems. But then I started getting a whiff of people trading free software somehow. There were references in message threads that didn't quite make sense.
Someone would mention getting "the latest version" of expensive software they clearly couldn't afford. Others would talk about "sources" and "connections" in vague terms. File areas would have suspicious gaps in numbering, suggesting hidden sections I couldn't access. Even on those legitimate boards, you'd occasionally see hints of something else.
Someone would post a phone number with no explanation. A file would appear in the downloads section with a cryptic name like "INTERESTING.TXT" or "READ_ME.NFO". Most people ignored these breadcrumbs. I couldn't resist following them.
THE PIRATE SHIP BBS ★ ★ ★ "SysOp: The SkeLeToN" ★ ★ ★ Des Moines, Iowa Node 1: (xxx) xxx-xxxx Node 2: (xxx) xxx-xxxx [N]ew User [L]ogin [G]uest [I]nfo [G]oodbye Press ESC to disconnect Enter your selection: █ The first underground board I found was The Pirate Ship in Des Moines, Iowa - which was fortunate since I lived in nearby Ankeny. The login screen looked different from the regular BBSes. Instead of cheerful welcome messages and user statistics, there was ASCII art of skulls and cryptic warnings about "federal monitoring" and "secure connections only." When I tried to create an account, the sysop - who went by The Skeleton - didn't just ask for my name and phone number. He wanted to know who had given me the number, what my technical background was, and most importantly, what I could contribute to "the community." This wasn't a place for casual users.
He rejected my application. Flat out. I had nothing to offer - no codes, no connections, no skills worth mentioning. I was lame pretending to be elite, and Skelly could smell it through the modem.
So I went away, figured out how to get my hands on some zero-day warez, and came back with something real. He let me upload, gave me download credits, and that was the beginning. Not a warm welcome - an audition I had to pass twice. What I learned later was that The Skeleton was running custom BBS software called Tempest, created by a local programmer and electrical engineer known as The Technician .
This wasn't some off-the-shelf package - it was custom-coded in C++ right here in Iowa, designed specifically for underground operations. The Technician worked out of his attic in Des Moines, and that attic was something else - completely covered in hardware, workbenches, tools, every surface buried under circuit boards and half-finished projects. The guy was kind, generous, funny as hell, and would modify hardware as easily as he wrote software. He did a C64 mod for me that cut a motherboard trace to boot straight into 80-column mode - no lame software 80-column display, a real hardware mod.
He was one of those guys equally comfortable programming assembly language and playing paintball with us on weekends - though he never let anyone forget the game where he took a direct hit to the nut-sack. The first thing I noticed was the file areas. Instead of utilities and shareware, there were sections labeled things like "Bell Operating Company Internal Documents," "PBX Default Passwords," and "Telco Test Numbers." The message areas had discussions about "boxing" - red boxing, blue boxing, concepts that meant nothing to me but sounded incredibly important. I spent my first month just reading and downloading everything I could understand, which wasn't much.
The files were full of terminology I'd never heard before. "COCOT" and "ESS" and "DTMF" and "2600Hz" - it was like learning a foreign language. But slowly, patterns started to emerge. "A phreak is someone who studies the telephone system in detail with the intent of understanding and, usually, subverting it." - From "A Beginner's Guide to Phreaking" by The Jolly Roger The revelation hit me gradually: these people weren't just using computers.
...continues in the full book.