Reading Little Brother reminded me of when I first got involved with computing. Okay, involved is stretching it, I guess I should say, became aware of computers. Around 1982-83, a friend at work told me about fights he got into on a bulletin board, and he asked me to help him write clever insults to send back to his attackers. We would search the dictionary for interesting words and write stupid stuff that we thought was funny and clever, but always involved the attacker's mother. It got boring fast.
But what I learned was that there were levels of trust that got more exclusive depending on how much trust you'd earned: give more, get more. One day, my friend gave me a piece of paper with a really long number written on it. He said that if I punched that number into any pay phone I could make long distance calls for free. I put the number away. But yes, I used it once.
But I remember that one of the ways my friend was supposed to earn trust was to give someone on the board credit card numbers from off the carbons we threw in the garbage after each credit card sale. Yeah, remember that, when every garbage can in every store was filled with personal data? I was in Sears once a few years ago to buy a dishwasher and the guy prints out a receipt for the delivery with name, address, phone number, and preferred delivery time then throws it in the bin under the register because he'd made a mistake. Horrified, I grabbed it from the garbage and took it with me. Holy crap!
Anyway, I never collected the carbons. The fun of computing was over for a while. Until around 1984 when some company started placing these computer kiosks in the mall that were used for printing out coupons for the local merchants and displaying ads. One of the other options on the kiosk menu was for playing Adventure. Which was freaking awesome!
Then I started saving my money to buy a computer so I could play games. What a dork.
And yes, still a dork.
