Fun with dial up modems as a kid: - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Beamin
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 01, 2018, 09:26:01 pm
content: I remember you could dial into bbs's with a dos program and set different bauds up to 9600 depending on the quality of the phone line or something. The very first person I ever pissed off via a keyboard and screen was the operator of a bbs that told me I was dialing in too much.But my fun didn't stop there.When I was 10 I would use the auto redial on the modem to call someone's house I didn't like. I would let it run on our second phone line. The screams through the tiny modem speaker were so angry after 30 minutes then worse after 12 hours. I don't know why they kept randomly answering their phone. I think they thought I was sitting there pressing redial and they would unplug their phones then plug them back in. It also blocked them from calling the phone company / police *67: every time they picked up the phone and tried to dial they were connected to the computer and I could hear them franticly trying to dial out between calls. "What if their house was on fire and they had to call the fire department" I was told, to which I responded "If their house is on fire they shouldn't be inside talking on their phone they should be at the neighbors."One time I thought I had turned it off after like 10 minutes but I forgot and left the house (how could I be prank calling if we were riding bikes with timmy?). I came back several hours latter and they were still answering it.You could also use the pause function to make it dial pagers and send someone pages over and over.Reverse paging was the best because you couldn't get caught: you take a prefix of pagers and set it up to call alternate phone numbers if it didn't get another modem on the first call. You could also do this using the pause feature but it would get out of step or something. I would just let it run then call the victims phone number after an hour and see what they said:"Hello?""Did someone page bob?""What the fuck? The phone company must be broken because you are the 100th person that called me!""Ok sorry but did you page me? What do want? It's definitely your number. Here I'll try dialing it again""Nooooooo" CLICK"Hello?""Did someone page bob?""I just told you I didn't page anyone!!!!""Ok so what do you want? your number came up"We would do that to the same guy once a week because he would get so angry. Having people accept the calls on cellular collect calls at $5.00 a minute was another fun thing. The would accept the call to yell at you depending how stupid they are.

author: bsudbrink
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: March 02, 2018, 04:10:36 pm
content: I'll share a little of my experience, I composed this about 15 years ago...Procedure For Connecting To The 'net Circa 1978(That's the ARPANET for all you young whipper-snappers.What we called the internet before they let all of the riff-raff in.)Initial notes:Do not begin this procedure before 11PM. This avoids conflictsover telephone usage with your parents. Net resources aregenerally not available to "tourists" before this time anyway.Resource availability is generally best on Friday, Saturday andSunday nights and holidays.Keep an ear open for police sirens. Rumor has it that the FCCwill come and arrest you (and/or your parents) if it detects illegalequipment attached to the telephone system.Another reason to operate late at night, they probably aren'twatching.1) Move your computer from your bedroom to the kitchentable (that's where the phone is!). Don't connect powerto the modem yet, it produces a carrier whenever it ispowered and you need to be able to hear the far end ofthe telephone connection when you first dial. Also, youwant it to be cool when you initiate the connection.2) Take the handset off of the hook and replace it with thepiece of broomstick that you fashioned for that purpose.3) Get a big towel from the linen closet. Fold it intoquarters and put the handset on it. Attach the speakerand microphone to the handset with wide rubber bands.Fold the towel over the handset. This will preventvarious ambient sounds (like the sound of typing) fromintroducing noise on the line.4) Being sure that the cassette/modem switch (a DPDT switchthat connects the transmit and receive pins of the USARTto either the cassette interface or the modem) is in thecassette position, load the terminal program. Run theprogram. You are greeted with a blank screen (this isnormal but you can't be 100% sure that it loaded correctlyuntil you have connected). Switch the cassette/modem switchto modem. You may see a few garbage characters on thescreen (that's a good sign).5) Get an ice cube from the freezer, put it in a sandwich bagand put it on the towel next to the modem.6) Remove the broom stick from the telephone hook and dial theNBS (National Bureau of Standards) TIP (Terminal InterfaceProcessor). Listen for the call to be answered and for thecarrier on the far end. Sometimes the TIP is down and won'tanswer, sometimes it is down and will answer but won't givea carrier. If it's down, wait an hour and try again.7) If you get a carrier, apply power to the modem. Startpressing the @ (at) key once a second until it is echoedon your screen. Listen for the chirp when you press thekey. If you don't hear it, the terminal program isn't runningcorrectly, hang up, unpower the modem, reset the computer andgo back to step 4.8) Once the @ character is echoed, press enter. You should getan error message (I no longer remember the text). Now type"@O 77<return>". This instructs the TIP to connect you to theMIT-DM (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dynamic Modeling)computer.9) Start pressing the return key once a second until you get alogon prompt (I no longer remember the prompt text). The username and password are GUEST.10) Once logged on, wait for a minute or two, pressing enter everyten seconds or so. This gives the operator a chance to noticeyou and kick you off if the system is busy. If he's in a chattymood, you'll get a message like "The system's busy, get lost!".If not, your connection will just die. If the system is busy,try again in an hour or so.11) I no longer remember how to start up Zork or some of the otherprograms... anyone feel free to provide details I'm missing.Keep an ear on the connection. If the carrier starts to changepitch, wipe any condensation off the ice cube bag on the toweland then apply to the smaller chip on the right on the modemboard.

author: abraxa
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: March 02, 2018, 04:24:34 pm
content: Quote from: Beamin on March 01, 2018, 09:26:01 pmYou're surprisingly proud for having been a serious little shit.

author: Ampera
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 02, 2018, 04:36:48 pm
content: Quote from: abraxa on March 02, 2018, 04:24:34 pmI have a modem and a phone, I could do that now if I wanted to.I'm just not that much of an asshole.

author: rdl
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 02, 2018, 05:23:46 pm
content: At one time Bulletin Board Systems were about all there was. No Internet, no AOL, nothing else really. I fell asleep once, late at night, while dialed into a BBS. I had already been on many hours. Long distance charges did apply. The phone bill for that month was one to remember.

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: March 03, 2018, 12:26:15 am
content: Quote from: TwoOfFive on March 02, 2018, 04:36:48 pmThese days it would be rather pointless and a waste of time on your part. It's easy for even end-users to block nuisance calls and lone gone are the days where the telephone network allows one end to keep a remote end "off hook". As soon as you hit that receiver button, the circuit is disconnected (notwithstanding that most services are VoIP now, at least in Australia, so it's all packet switched).Then of course there is the legal aspect, tracing calls is as easy as a few clicks with a mouse for those with access to those parts of the network and you'll find yourself in trouble pretty quickly.Nevertheless, it would be a dick move.

author: NiHaoMike
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 03, 2018, 01:41:33 am
content: Nowadays, it would be quite easy to defeat attempts to trace calls using Google Voice (on a burner account) and public Wifi. But as already mentioned, it would not be particularly effective since phones nowadays can block numbers.I expect the modern equivalent would be spamming UDP packets to use up data caps. The worst part is that the victim would not be able to mitigate it on their own.

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: March 03, 2018, 01:59:40 am
content: Quote from: NiHaoMike on March 03, 2018, 01:41:33 amPossibly, however it would be difficult on 4G/5G services as multiple devices share the same IP address on a cell tower and a fair chunk of fixed line services have unlimited data.

author: Beamin
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 03, 2018, 08:34:33 pm
content: Quote from: bsudbrink on March 02, 2018, 04:10:36 pmLets pretend you put that on instructables and see what kinds of responses you would get:1. If I don't have a broom stick can I use a piece of mop handle?2. I tried this and it didn't work. Why? I skipped the step that was hard and/or costs money.3. Instead of an ice cube can I use one of those cold packs? What if it is already warm?4. I have a black modem will the black one work?5. The FCC doesn't have sirens they just come to your house.6. If we keep the towels in the laundry basket instead of the linen closet can we use one from there or does it have to come from the linen closet?7. This doesn't work.8. Do I need to know how to do math?9.Will this work of the phone is cut off? Ours got cut off because they claim we didn't pay the bill. They are being unfair we only owe for 6 months bill not 9 like they said. We got a money order and we don't have the receipt but I'm telling you we paid it. My kid made those long distance calls not me I shouldn't have to pay that. Can't you put on his credit I have his social security number. Can we just put it in his name and not pay for it?10. Do you have the phone number to AOL's customer service? The CD they mailed us has a crack in it and we can't get it load. Would tape fix it? What if we don't have tape?

author: Ampera
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 03, 2018, 10:40:06 pm
content: This was during a time, and I speak from second hand tales, not experience, where in order to survive and know how to use a computer in any capacity, you would have to put significant time and effort into becoming properly computer literate. All this stupidity with people and computers is something that I believe really took off in the mid to late 90's when home computing was made too easy. I could also be bullshitting, as I wasn't alive in the 90's.Personally, I've never found even the more abstract computer systems to be hard to use. Even systems with switch panels instead of any significant terminal interface I could probably figure out.

author: Beamin
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 03, 2018, 11:01:24 pm
content: Quote from: TwoOfFive on March 03, 2018, 10:40:06 pmYeah late 90's is about right. But even earlier was once you took away the dos prompt and made things you could click on that was it. I do remember at windows you could open ever file / program tree and knew what every file did on your computer that was when computer could be fixed with no training just using common sense. Now the file/program structure is huge and things are purposely hidden from the user. My pet peeve was when you couldn't remove things like facebook (I have never been t facebook and never will at one point it seemed companies thought a face book page was better then a url) from your phone or windows doesn't easily let you remove the bloat ware.

author: Ampera
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 04, 2018, 12:04:06 am
content: mmm bloatwareGotta hate it. Any time an OS is shipped with applications you remove, it pisses me off, even if I like the application. Facebook is a load of shit, and while anybody is subject to their own right to use it, it doesn't change the fact it's a load of shit.

author: sony mavica
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: March 04, 2018, 12:41:28 am
content: I remember back in like 2004 when I was 14 playing around with an nokia 7260 mobile phone settings and some how I got free unlimited internet connecting phone to my pc via the Infrared port and it would run at 128kb so download speed was like 12kb much better then crappy 56k dialup I had at the time ended up getting rid of dialup

author: Red Squirrel
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 04, 2018, 12:50:23 am
content: Haha imagine someone doing stuff like that today? Probably get raided by the FBI and thrown in a FPMITA facility.They go overboard with hacking related stuff now days (even though that was not really hacking).I do recall doing port scans and stuff before realizing that it was highly illegal. I found out about the Sub7 trojan and started to look for people that had it and started to mess with them. I was not really in it to cause anyone harm, just to have a little fun. I remember doing scans in some lower IP ranges and finding some DoD web pages and stuff. Like sites that are publicly accessible but not really meant for the public. There was a login page saying to not even attempt. Me being a kid on a computer thinking "what can really happen?" so of course I tried lol.As far as modems go, at one job we had a modem we used to connect to a pager system to program them. Me and another coworker would randomly go on it and type commands to call my other coworker's phone just to mess with him. He'd pickup and it would just be dead air then we'd type the command to hang up. Do it casually while having a conversation so he had no idea. Fun stuff.

author: Beamin
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 04, 2018, 10:42:42 am
content: Our phone and cable boxes were on the ground and we had adelphia cable the worst company even worse then Comcast. Adelphia got shut down by the sEC for committing massive fraud. The cable modem would work maybe 50% of the time going down for hours each day. The people in customer service didn't understand why we were upset. This was when cable internet was 80$ a month and 90% of people had dial up. I used my internet a lot so it absolutely sucked having to switch to dial up but paying for cable.I remember just stealing our cable TV to see if they noticed. About a month after I stole the cable we got direct TV and it wasn't until years later the internet cable repair man asked if our cable TV was having problems. I said we got direct tv 4 years ago. He said we had cable the whole time. Oops. I took a rock and bashed this blocker thing in the coax and screwed in the cable and saved 60$ a month. Ironic part was nothing was on.Most fun part was phreaking and reading all the color box articles people would post on those message boards that were like forums but in that generic system font on gray back grounds. Everyone's email was like bob@eaglecast.net or some really obscure company they had at work. No Smileygurl1982@yahoo because you could get any name you wanted there were so few users.

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 04, 2018, 11:41:10 am
content: Quote from: NiHaoMike on March 03, 2018, 01:41:33 amI never thought of that one of using up data caps.I did do an experiment with a friend where i tried to send as many ping packets to his IP as i could. This ended up being about 50Mbit worth of ping requests, i couldn't get it to saturate my 150Mbit upload likely because ping packets are small so some part of the network was likely unable to route that many packets per second. What was on that IP tho was a 10Mbit ADSL modem. Internet there died in an instant and crashed the modem so badly that it needed a reboot before it would work again. But even if the modem was fast enough to survive it then any home grade router that's plugged into it would likely give up the ghost if sent so many packets at once.So if i was to just send large data packets that can easily saturate my150Mbit uplink and left it running overnight for 8 hours that would rack up 500GB of data. Tho here in Europe only cellular internet has data caps.Not that i would do such a thing but i did try port scanning thing around my IP. Lots of upload bandwidth means you can blast requests out like a firehose and scan all the ports on 10s of thousands of IPs in minutes, tho again a beefy network router is needed to handle that many packets going trough it at once. You can find a lot of things just listening to the internet, quite a few with default passwords even.

author: Ampera
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 04, 2018, 09:20:40 pm
content: Congrats you just DoS'd your friend!

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 05, 2018, 06:18:14 am
content: I just ran it for a minute or so and he was also curious how badly things would fail if i did that. So no malicious intent behind it.

author: NiHaoMike
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 05, 2018, 06:31:54 am
content: Some recent cable modems are very easy to DoS.https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/27/intel_puma6_chipset_trivial_to_dos/

author: Ampera
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 05, 2018, 06:50:00 am
content: Quote from: Berni on March 05, 2018, 06:18:14 amDoS isn't always malicious or illegal. There is no difference between a DoS attack and just a lot of traffic besides intent. What makes it illegal is doing it knowingly to take down a system you don't have permission to take down.

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 05, 2018, 10:57:37 am
content: Quote from: NiHaoMike on March 05, 2018, 06:31:54 amWow that is pretty crap if that little traffic can knock it out.This is why i keep insisting with my ISP to give me a dumb modem without any router functionality while using my own "office grade" router that can keep up no problem even with routing the full gigabit of traffic that its ports can do. I had enough problems with cheap ISP hardware and cheap home grade routers to learn its all garbage.

author: Red Squirrel
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 05, 2018, 09:21:25 pm
content: I too hate that most ISPs give modems with built in routers now. I just want a basic modem because no matter what I want to use my pfsense box as my main gateway. By having another NAT device I end up with a double NAT which is a pain to manage. For my particular ISP, someone actually wrote a custom firmware for an Asus router where it's a drop in replacement for the ISP one, and it gives the option to do pass through, so that way my Firewall gets an outside IP directly. Downside is once that option is applied the router is no longer a layer 3 device so you can't connect back to it if you change your mind. I think a factory reset would probably work though.

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 06, 2018, 07:03:04 am
content: So far i was lucky enough to be able to get the ISPs box to be a modem. Had lots of different ones because i went trough a lot of ISPs.Sometimes they are nice enough to ask if you already have a router so they give you an actual dumb modem with a single ethernet jack on the back. Then for some time they handed out only router like modems, but if another router tried to authenticate on its port with PPPoE they would start acting like a modem.One had a weird thing where it could do both, it piggybacked on the PPPoE authentication acting as two modems, one that your router is talking to and another one the internal router was talking to. As as result if you connected to the ISP modems wifi network you had a different external IP than your own router had.Then another ISP would give you a built in router but i could call them up and they remotely flashed it to work as a dumb modem. Unforcenetly they set up something wrong and ended up locking themselves out, on a friday afternoon too. More calls to them over the weekend just had them saying that they can't connect to it so its likely a hardware problem. But eventualy on monday looks like there IT wizard came back to work and got it working again and got it to work like a modem as i asked.Then again this is one of the polite ISPs here. When they started doing fiber they transitioned us from DSL to fiber for free. Sent a contractor to dig up the yard and lay the fiber cable and later sent there guys to run the fiber to the modem. The monthly cost of the new plan on fiber did cost like 2€ more tho.