a modem hand cut from copper clad, plugged into the user port, and hooked up to pirate radio, that connected to another country.

Whenever I see people on HN talking about the insane levels of abstraction and indirection the tech industry has built for itself, I remember the crazy things we used to do with little more than bare wires and curiosity.

People on HN complain that they can't get work done because their 48-inch monitor isn't OLED. We would hack mainframes on the other side of the planet with a 40x7 character unlit LCD, and no internet.