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Telenet as you'll recall was a competitor. I used it to get into NJIT's EIES system, another terrific mulituser platform. Telenet seemed to perform better than
by howard941 2y ago
Telenet as you'll recall was a competitor. I used it to get into NJIT's EIES system, another terrific mulituser platform. Telenet seemed to perform better than Tymnet, with less jitter.
Both Telenet and IIRC Tymnet were portals into The Source which preceded CIS.
- kragen 2y agoeventually there were telenet and the source, yes
- newobj 2y agoclicked into the thread just to see if ppl mentioned tymnet and telenet what up fellow olds
- kragen 2y agotoday? i've been watching the sun rise, benchmarking fibonacci in tcl, designing analog electronics, trying out zulip, helping ukrainians build rf jammers, listening to 80s music, building a database of historical bar data from financial markets, and watching an episode of skibidi toilet. how about you?
- howard941 2y agohey there graybeard. we made it to 2024! thought I'd die before I got old.
- technofiend 2y agoTelenet in Houston had a connection to a local credit agency of some kind. You could look up payment history and searches may have even created profiles for people who didn't have one. I'm a little surprised there's no mention of CompuServe's billing hole. We discovered via purchase of their documentation a quick Fortran program to wipe billing info would let you stay connected cost free. By the time we found that loophole it was closed a few weeks after and clearing the info would force a logout instead.
- worstspotgain 2y agoTelenet and Tymnet were the main US X.25 networks. [1] X.25 was the global standard packet-switched network that preceded the Internet. It was mostly B2B, as it was pay-by-the-minute plus pay-by-the-packet, plus of course the cost of the modem phone call if any. Access to some of the X.25 networks was easily hacked, as there was almost no cybercrime back then outside of teenagers. In some cases, there was only a logon code - no password at all. I remember a network where the code was just a short-ish number, so it could be easily mined via brute-force search. The modem bank would disconnect you after X failed attempts, but you could just dial back in right away (there was no caller ID either.) X.25 had hosts called Outdials in most area codes that would let you make a local modem call back out for no extra charge, as long as it was toll-free. [2] This was a way to avoid expensive long-distance BBS calls, particularly if you were using a mined X.25 logon. The latency was pretty bad but the connection could be much more reliable than a modem on a noisy long-distance line. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.25 [2] https://github.com/maestron/hacking-tutorials/blob/master/Basic%20Networking.txt https://github.com/maestron/hacking-tutorials/blob/master/Ba...
- icedchai 2y agoI got involved near the tail end of the x.25 era, over 30 years ago now. I remember connecting to QSD, Lutzifer, and some other less well known systems. I also wrote my own Telenet "war dialing" tools that would scan for other stuff to connect to. Exciting times for a teenager!
- Scramblejams 2y agoC617138 took one to MIT, IIRC. (Or was it 617139?) I didn’t have a login to that system, though. :-( Just a bored teenager on the west coast who’d somehow found an X.25 dialup number and it felt so mysterious and cool! Edit: oh hey! It was a Multics box! https://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/nin/csr-nin-033.pdf https://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/nin/csr-nin-033...