I'm old enough to be on the border of the millennial generation, but I certainly dont identify with it. I grew up dialing into local BBS's because our ISP was

I'm old enough to be on the border of the millennial generation, but I certainly dont identify with it. I grew up dialing into local BBS's because our ISP was a long distance phone call (hell, where I grew up, calling half of my classmates was a long distance phone call). Through junior high/high school I was known as "the hacker" not because I was actually cracking system or anything, but merely because I knew how, and was comfortable with using a computer. I cut my teeth on DOS 3.0 on a 286 with a whopping 40 MB HD. I once got suspended for a week because a teacher "saw me with a black screen", aka a DOS prompt, the week before the school network crash, and assumed it must be related (I actually had nothing to do with the crash, I merely knew the keyboard shortcut in WordPerfect 5.1 to temporarily exit to a DOS prompt - super hacker skills, right?). Anyways, my parents and I didn't fight the suspension, because there was no evidence available to us that I didnt do it. My parents asked me point blank if I did it and I honestly replied no. Their response was: "well, youre going to learn how to". Thats how I got my first programming books. Not that I needed the programming knowledge, but a year later I did own my school's network. More the social engineering route than anything. I got a copy of the remote access tool the sysadmin was using. I could remote in (no password required, this was the 90s, all I needed was the phone number, which was handily affixed to the modem). I just had to time it such that the network drive backup was complete, then I had sysadmin access (I reran the backup so he'd see the completed screen when he got in the morning). I forget exactly how many admin counts I had, but it was at least 5 in case one got discovered (this was all Novell Netware back in the day). Admin access granted universal access. I could have changed grades (never needed to for myself and I didnt whore out my access). I could impersonate teachers over internal email and a precursor to IM. Not super hacker skills. Mostly stumbling around and befriending the lab admin. At times, it did help that I could type faster than the admin. Memories...