I grew up doing the BBS thing for many years, then when the internet started emerging with CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL a lot of us effectively moved there. Ill

I grew up doing the BBS thing for many years, then when the internet started emerging with CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL a lot of us effectively moved there. Illicit things I remember the "AOL era": * CC generators actually worked to create an account that would last a good amount of time * In the early days (~ AOL v2.5) they had a CGI form you could fill out and have a disc sent to your home. So of course we scripted it and had hundreds of free formattable 3.5"'s. A bit down the road and MS had a similar thing for Windows '95 replacement discs -- they'd send you the entire set if one was bad, which was a lot of good discs :) * AOL at one point allowed ordering physical products (early digital cameras and the like) via your account credit. Mix in a phished account and you can see how that goes. * I can't remember the names right now, but there were services in which you could pick up a CD and get free dial-up email access. The gig is they would show you ads. Patch the EXE and viola, you essentially just have a PPP account to the web.