The PBS Nova episode about Stoll was the literal starting point of my discovery of the internet. Because of the show, my next year in university I signed up fo

The PBS Nova episode about Stoll was the literal starting point of my discovery of the internet. Because of the show, my next year in university I signed up for an elective CompSci course (I was an English Literature major) about threat assessment. Part of our course involved browsing the RISKS Forum newsgroup on the Sparc Stations at the University of Toronto Engineering Annex. That episode was also the beginning of my fascination with telecom equipment, which I got the chance to use professionally for about a year in 1998-1999. There's a telephone museum about an hour from where I live that still has a working mechanical switch that you can dial on and see it working.