Story time.

Remember when dial-up was “unlimited”, until it wasn’t? I would stay connected 24/7 because I was running FTP servers announced on IRC. Well, eventually unlimited became a restricted number of hours in a month and I had to disconnect. I then discovered the whole BBS underground and was amazed.

I would find BBS numbers online, in magazines, anywhere and everywhere I could find them. Well, I dialed into all of them. All around the world. I would stay connected for hours.

One morning I was getting ready for school and heard my parents arguing like crazy with the phone company. It was a multi-thousand dollar bill. Well, back in the day, not only were there long-distance charges, but apparently there was also a connection charge as well each time. So when I dialed in and would inevitably get disconnected after a few minutes and re-dial, there would be a connection charge each time. My parents were saying (more like yelling), “There is no way we could dial that many numbers!” I had no idea what the heck was going or why they were talking about that. Then it hit me like a shock to the system. “Holy shit, that’s from all my BBS dialing!”

They continued to argue with the phone company about not paying the bill and there must be something wrong somewhere. Then they wrapped up the call.

As we left for school I causally asked what all that was about.

They concluded it must have been the cordless phone and someone was making calls on our line by connecting to our cordless base station.

:->

My BBS days were obviously over.