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Comment by RyanZAG | Hacker News Reader

Yes but from a teenager in Krugersdorp? And South Africa did not have such easy access to the international telephone market. The country was in the middle of economic sanctions at the time - international calls had to be placed through a switchboard with the government run telecom monopoly provider - Telkom. They also cost a literal arm and a leg for a couple minutes and were heavily monitored by the Apartheid regime. An actual police state.

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There were FidoNet systems as early as 1988: http://www.textfiles.com/fidonet-on-the-internet/n1988/nodel...

Look for "Region,49" and you'll see a small number of them, but they were in Port Elizabeth, Cape Town, and Johannesburg.

Whether they could actually dial out to the rest of the world is open to question, but they would have needed to at least be accessible from the outside world for them to even be on FidoNet in the first place.

Wealthy kids have access to toys others don't I knew what a modem was and why I wanted one long before I actually got my hands on one, because I'd seen American teenagers using them in movies, eg War Games in 1983 (which I rewatched recently and was rather surprised to find it still holds up for what it is). Also, there may have been no need to call internationally. When I was into home and later business computers as a teen in the 1980s in Ireland (which was then as economically benighted as SA for quite different reasons) things like porn, bbs software, and lists of 'interesting' phone numbers were circulated on floppy disks; I ran a safe stash out of my school locker because the teachers thought I was too nerdy to be mixed up with the 'delinquent' kids. A single sided 5.25" floppy seemed like oodles of storage space back in those days XD

I don't find this claim so remarkable, though it's certainly possible that the details are fuzzily remembered nearly 30 years later.

As a teenager in the US, it was one of my main activities, so I can believe the age. I'm not sure about how it would go in SA.

Teenager in the US at the same time.

Yep, this is exactly what we did with our 8-bit machines and modems at the time.

We were global even then.

EDIT- LOL. I guess the HN downvoters have proof this isn't what we were doing back then???

I didn't vote, but my guess would be that this is a me-too comment, which the community discourages. If you wish to echo a parent comment, it's expected that you add a significant contribution.

> I'm not sure about how it would go in SA.

In Krugersdorp in the late 1980s? And the police were on the case - both in terms of being tech-savy enough, and not having more pressing concerns? (1)

Let's say that it's an extra-ordinary claim and we'd like a little more weight behind it.

1) http://www.saha.org.za/ecc25/ecc_under_a_state_of_emergency....

The police likely intercepted material delivered via regular post, and worked their way up from there. No need to know how something was ordered, as long as selling it is illegal.

I'm not sure if there were additional barriers to blue-boxing out of SA, but I know people went through SA...

"In the Esquire article, Captain Crunch narrates excitedly to his interviewer Ron Rosenbaum the process by which he connected a single long-distance call via switching stations across Asia, Europe, South Africa, South America and the East coast until he reached a specific telephone in California."

Depends how much chance you have to lose yourself in an internal SA call to one or more SxS COs before the overseas hop, you could be pretty hard to catch. But, if there wasn't a lot of international traffic they could just snoop on the overseas hop and figure out who you were.

First time I saw a modem in SA was on a farm in the (late) 80's in the Karoo. I was from Jhb. Krugersdorp doesn't look that insane to me! I used to get Amiga stuff from an acquaintance who ran a BBS around '90 and regularly connected overseas. He had some trickery he used to get around phone bills, police state or not.

There probably weren't many such teenagers who did that. However, the likelihood that a particular such teenager did that, given that said teenager later wrote popular security software, seems pretty high.

I used to attend computer science classes in Vereeniging on Mondays after normal school. It was at another school, and I had to travel about 70km to get there. I did them from standard 8 to matric, 1986 to 1988, and in 1987 we dialled into something and connected to someone in New York, I think it was. I wasn't all that into it so probably missed a lot of the detail, but it was a big deal for the school. And clearly it was possible.

"They also cost a literal arm and a leg for a couple minutes"

Really ? Honestly, that's even more interesting than the truecrypt/arms dealer story ...

Pictures ?

When they say "arms" dealer...

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