... so 1000 USD per disk?

Quite expensive service?

I ran a BBS in the early '90s and because of its content managed to attract two users from NASA's JPL - who'd log in from work every day because dialling in from home (from the USA to Australia) would've cost them a fortune.

At a blistering 14.4Kbps, mind you!

All went well until they got discovered.

By way of coincidence, my main server ran OS/2 WarpServer, which ran steadfastly without a reboot for more than four years, until the time came to shut the operation down (the internet pretty well killed BBSs).

A local call to your provider in order to receive an email is still only a local call charge.

Back in the 90's you would indeed stay 'on the line' for hours downloading but still only

at a local call cost at most - so the $40,000 charge is somewhat implausible.

Perhaps an AI at work here. ??

Didn't get it at local rate in the UK. Also there was a 50:50 chance of actually getting a large file before the connection broke.

When I first went online via work, we had Compuserv.

"Local" node was 9600 at Lincoln, which was too far (2 STD codes away) to be a "local" call.

London was 14,400. And therefore the same price as calling Lincoln, so we used the London node.

At that time, a local all, in daytime hours, was IIRC 4p/min, and other calls were around 16p/min.

Call it £10 an hour for the call, plus the cost of the Compuserv connect time... It added up fast.

It doesn't say where he was dialing from. In the US, local call areas are sometimes quite small. In Aus, downloading OS/2 updates might have meant calling the USA at international rates. I don't know what the situation was in the UK at that time, but large call charges aren't totally implausible.

In the UK, a local call is normally your area code, and the area codes that touched it.

My local PoPs at the rough time this story appears to date from were 3 area codes away at 9600, or 8 area codes away, also at 9600.

As they were going to be national rate calls anyway, we dialled London, over 200 miles away, at it ran at 14,400, and would cost the same per minute as the closer PoPs.

The story is not too far out of line. I think we forget how far we have come in the last 35 years.

A typical 1.44mb floppy took around 1hr 45m to download on a 2400 baud modem. That was a pretty big chunk too. Countless times it would get to 99% and then get a CRC error and restart. It was much safer to grab smaller chunks to increase the probability of getting a clean file and minimize the loss of a restart. I remember only getting a clean download 10-20% of the time with anything that took over an hour to download. Restarts were very common.

Now mix in a little bit of corporate paranoia and unsigned files. It is easy to see a corporate policy that all patches shall only come from the vendor's servers on the vendor's phone number. No concept of signed code until the late 1990's, so only a chain-of-custody could be relied upon for code authenticity.

Back in those days, "Long Distance" calling charged by the minute. To see really high rates, make a call overseas. Even if the vendor provided in-country connectivity, it was pretty well known that the new stuff came from the main office and often took a while to trickle down.

And the vendor-provided the modem pool wasn't regularly updated to the latest & greatest. 2400 baud was top speed in the late 1980's. 9600 & 14.4 came out in the early 1990's, so stumbling across a rack of 'legacy' 2400 baud modems in those years was not uncommon.

Let's play with those numbers a bit.... 1hr 45m for a floppy to download at 2400 baud, 40 floppies for OS/2 = 4200 minutes. Let's say a 20% success rate, that means 21,000 minutes. Call it $2 per minute international calling rates, there is the $40k bill.

Sure, there are a lot of ways this could be done better (like pay to ship the patch in the mail). But the story is very plausible given the tech of the era.

I used to download stuff to my account at Stanford using the fledgling Internet over Switched56, then ride the Bultaco over to the school[0] with a handful of 8" floppies (later QIC tapes) to collect the stuff for home use. Admittedly, the latency sucked, but my bandwidth was far higher than the modem at 1200 ... Later I did the same thing, except the files were downloaded to my server under Bryant Street in Palo Alto via BARRNet at T1 speed and I walked over to collect the data.

[0] Using San Francisquito Creek as a shortcut ... A hack that would probably get me hung, drawn and quartered by today's nature nazis.

I lived in a company apartment in NYC for a year. The internet service was via cable modem but only the downlink, the uplink was over the phone line. Obviously I brought along the server running my DNS and email so the phone line was pretty much permanently pegged up by the server. I believe local calls were free but wasn't there a time limit after which they started charging? I was never asked to pay anything...

When I moved back to the UK, DSL was in its embryonic days fortunately.

"William used certain tools to concatenate the files sent in this fashion, and then build them into a binary. He’d done this at work, so felt confident he could get the patch he needed for his home PC without attracting undue attention."

UU encode and UU decode? I remember getting files emailed to me that way around 1992, very handy way to get files before the WWW was around.

> UU encode and UU decode

For reliable comms across the disc.

> UU encode and UU decode

>For reliable comms across the disc.

The last time I used UU encode/decode, I was working in a secure environment and had to copy software updates from a supplier into the environment - and the only option was to zip it, chunk it, UUencode it and email it - decoding at the other end. This worked fine for months - albeit tediously - until one of the updates suddenly started generating swears in the middle of the uuencoding block and the profanity filter intercepted the emails...!

There were email-to-FTP gateways and attendant software that handled the drudge work for you.

Back in the late 1990's, I worked for one company which got bought by another company across the country. Instead of a split tunnel, they backhauled all the traffic to the new corporate office. They had variable speed links that would bring more bandwidth on when required, but was otherwise notoriously slow.

I figured out that "PING -l 65500" to the gateway IP address would send 65k hits to corporate office. Being the curious sort, I launched multiple CMD windows with multiple PING commands just to see where things choked at. Surprisingly speeds didn't choke, they got faster. So I ran CMD windows on a few more PCs and everything went wonderful. Co-workers even remarked how the systems at corporate were more responsive and they were more productive.

Thus it became my daily routine to launch some CMD windows in the morning and shut them down in the evening, making it look like daily work-hours traffic. Until one day I got lazy and left them running overnight.

The next morning I was promptly hauled in front of HR to explain myself and what I was doing to 'hack the system'. I explained what I did and told the HR lady, "If PING is so dangerous, why is the command available on all the computers in the office? " That earned me a 'Don't do it again' warning.

The network team got the message though. They begrudgingly paid for more bandwidth.

In hindsight, I figured out how the system worked and took advantage of it. I guess that is a fundamental component of 'hacking', so maybe the HR lady was right after all? Cheers to edgy problem solving that almost got me fired. Corporate culture is a lot less forgiving these days.

William should have been Regomised to Bill for this one

Bill Stickers will be prosecuted

Bill Stickers is innocent.

Bill Posters was framed.

I used to work somewhere with an office on the border between France and Switzerland. iphones had just started to be given to people, but roaming charges were still insane. Apparently the phones belonging to people in one building with poor mobile reception flipped to the other country's network and then ran up huge phone bills.

It didn't take long for the order to go out telling people to disable roaming...

Oh I remember many similar situations. Coverage for border areas was usually poor, making the problem worse.

Switzerland is a fun one too! IIRC they were quite expensive compared to some other EU countries, and it took a while for them to be included in the EU zone for roaming purposes. (As a side note, Switzerland is the main reason i know about all of the different European treaties and zones, because I need to check if rules apply to Switzerland before i travel there!)

There have been some recent instances of people on the Norfolk coast having their mobiles roam to Maritime networks at a potential cost of cabillion pounds a minute.

With the demise of free EU roaming on many UK mobile networks you have to be careful on the south coast. We were at Dover Castle a while back and my brother had to make an urgent call. No problem, until he got the French equivalent of, "This number has not been recognised!"

I worked for a large company that made traffic light systems in the UK. We had a bunch of operators on shift and a fleet of VAX minis. We also had a modem pool.

One operator loved playing MUD on the Essex Uni system... He'd dial in from home for short sessions. He sometimes played "on the clock" when he was doing a nightshift. One day, he decided to do a raid, but there wasn't anyone else around to help, so he set up a bunch of terminals to run as the "team" and spent the night going through MUD dungeon... Only it was sticky mud.

The phone bill came in at the end of the month and his little dungeon raid had cost the company couple of grand! Luckily for him, his mate ran the internal billing system and was checking the Telecom invoice. He admitted what he had done and got a slap on the wrist from his mate and, on the promise never to do that again, the bill was spread evenly across all the projects that used the dial-up modems... A lucky escape.

Icon: Whatever you do, there is always someone watching you!

The same operator once caught me away from my terminal. Policy was to log off when you left your desk, I was just running around the corner and in the middle of a big edit, so I left the terminal logged on.

When I came back, he had made some white space in the middle of the file and prominent in the middle of the screen was the sentence "write out 1,000 times, I will log off my terminal, when I leave my desk!"

So, I opened a new file, wrote the sentence and copy and pasted it 1,000 times into the file (macro). I then exited the file and started the VAX Phone utility (a forerunner for ICQ and everything that came after it). The operator answered and I piped the file to his terminal! :-D

I once met a senior manager who was on the receiving end of something similar. A secretary at one of his customers was working on an email to send to the SM, she left her desk to carry out some task quickly, came back and sent the email... Only, while she was away, some joker had written some inappropriate text in the middle of the email, along the lines of a nice rear and wanting some hands on experience with it... The poor woman was mortified, when she found out, but, luckily the senior manager at the supplier thought it was absolutely hilarious and was laughing and telling everyone about the email he had received, so there was no damage done to the relationship between the two companies. I don't know hwat happened to the idiot that typed the message...

But another time, I was working late, along with a couple of other people, when the site manager came in and ordered everybody to leave. I told him I had a deadline, he said, no problem, he'd talk to the customer, leave NOW!

I found out later that a colleague had gone up to the his PA, opened his trousers and plonked the contents on her desk and asked her, what she could do with that... She said she needed a second opnion and called her manager... That was why we were asked to leave, he was marched in, once we had left, to clear out his desk, never to be seen again. I have no idea how he explained his sudden lack of a job and, probably, impending prosecution, to his fiancé once he got home. Again, not me, but that was a very expensive mistake for the colleague, and I would assume devastating the fiancé and traumatic for the PA.

Ah... MUDs. We had a Gandalf PACX with both an inbound and outbound modem, so not only could you play MUDs on the clock but you could play them from home on only a local rate by proxying through the Gandalf. It was found out of course and I suspect that the datacomms manager knew that it was me.. but he was also the Union shop steward and nothing was said.

Ah, Gandalfs, now that brings back memories.

"I was there Gandalf, I was there 3,000 years ago." OK, I'm exagerating, it was only about 35 years ago. :-D

Not me but a user in the company I worked for.

Groupwise while an ok email and calendar, had a flaw. Async upload and download, with queues that wouldn't clear without manual intervention, so if you had a download and it failed there was a reasonable chance that it wouldn't just reconnect, but would want to create / upload & download everything again.

Of course this was before widespread internet gateways so the user would have to dial into the office to connect to the Groupwise gateway.

So this user had someone email him some ISOs

That he then tried to download several times

From his HOTEL phone in (I believe) South America, while dialling the US Gateway

And it kept on failing (I wonder why) so he kept on trying, each time the requested download getting larger and larger. I can't remember the outcome, but the fact we all heard about it meant it must have been a significant cost.

On a slightly different note, we had a phone number that got forwarded to a SatPhone for the PMs to contact the Rigs from home / normal mobile (even that was expensive back then).

there was suddenly a huge spike in costs. It turns some Ned had a hacked sky box that was calling a random local number (ours)

Back in the dim and distant late 90's I worked for a large retailer.

Whilst our main business was computerised, with tills and stock ordering connected to Head Office on an ISDN line, the main operation of the store was still paper based, with fax machines used to communicate between branches.

That is until one day, when we were notified, by fax obviously, of the imminent arrival of "Workbench", a computer system that would provide online procurement for store consumables, online staff recruitment via a link to Job Centres, MS Office (97 I think we got) and email.

Our store manager at the time was something of a luddite, and had never used any kind of computer, so would need dragging into the computer age. To this end I found an old PC, loaded it with Windows and MS Office, then proceeded to teach him basic computing, right down to how to operate a mouse and keyboard.

Three months later, after the successful introduction of our "Workbench", which turned out to be a Wyse terminal linked to the Head Office mainframe, that manager left, presumable to join a company that didn't use computers.

As I was tidying his paperwork and getting the office ready for our new manager, I found the phone bill for the spare line I'd used to connect the PC to the internet, it was well over £2,500.

I'd set up the PC with a free ISP, so the calls were to an 0845 number at about 4p a minute. I think he'd been on the internet the whole working week for about a month.

I'd scrapped the PC after the Wyse terminal was installed, I dread t think what was on the hard drive...

In my office, it was a user who realised that she could forward her desk phone to an international number and, by dialling her desk phone from home, it was redirected abroad and while she was charged at local rate, the company was charged the international rate.

As big_D says, "Whatever you do, there is always someone watching you!" So, yes, she was quickly caught, international dialling was restricted to all but certain extensions and we were all given a talking to. (Unsure what exactly happened to her, but she kept her job.)

Unsure what exactly happened to her, but she kept her job.

This was fairly common for a while at a certain University whose financial management and policy framework were largely figments of an addled imagination.

Well over six months before the proverbial dropped and only after a gobal corpoarate had suffered from the same complaint.

No one got more than a mild reprimand as there was absolutely no policy on acceptable ICT usage or much else for that matter.

Seven years later and only after workplace legislative changes was a policy banning NSFW content from University hardware and networks added.

Remembering my first PC after my Amiga, it was a 486 SX/33 which I upgraded to a 486 DX4/100, the modem was a 28.8 baud and my first ISP was Compuserve from a magazine CD, the PC came installed with WFW 3.11, a friend had a copy of Win 95 on floppy which was quickly installed.

Happy days indeed.

Mines the one with the Win 95 floppies in the pocket -->

Back before VPNs became viable and when most internet access was dial up the corporate I worked for dictated that we had to provide access to our AS/400 for an office in the Netherlands (and of course with no budget). I did warn them that the only viable method at the time was via ISDN between the sites which would be charged at international call rates.

Due to the nature of the connection we'd had to set quite a long keep alive time, after the first month or two, and substantial phone bills, it was decided they'd do all the paperwork in one go each morning! It was still cheaper than an international leased line would have been but the Dutch operation really wasn't large enough to justify the effort and cost.

We built a client some PCs to take over layout/production for his printing firm.

Running NT 3.51 then NT4. The NT4 machines had Diamond Viper video cards (Weitek P9100 based)

We found a flaw in it, where art work being dragged in Corel Draw would overwrite the tool bars.

Diamond told us there's a fix. It's the latest driver.

Which was only available on their BBS.

We're in the UK. BBS was in California.

The BBS didn't support Z-modem. It only just supported X-Modem1K.

4,800 was the fastest I could get the link to go (14,400 modem on this end) over the transatlantic links.

It dropped multiple times.

The driver fitted onto 1 1.44Mb floppy.

The call costs were over £85.

Not monetarily expensive...

I worked for a company that printed money (literally). Governments would get them to design and print their currency, if they didn't have their own mint. They also had a side-line in ID cards and elections.

They were hired to run the elections in for an African country that was having problems with rebels at the time, luckily I didn't have a passport, so I was stuck in head office providing support.

We used Lotus cc:Mail and dial-in modems. Everything was working fine, until the team set-up shop and tried to contact the mail server. They kept complaining that it wasn't working. In the end, I plugged a phone into one of the modems and got them to call in and listened on the line. In the middle of the modem handshake there was a loud click in the line and both modems dropped the connection. The government was attempting to tap the line, but their equipment was so old, it made an audible click on the line as it kicked in. The team had to formally request that the line not be tapped and that it was only used for computer connections, which they couldn't listen in on anyway.