The 80's were even better than the 90's for Warez, the real golden age. Modems were slow, and you had to really want to transfer the warez, overnight, for as lo

The 80's were even better than the 90's for Warez, the real golden age. Modems were slow, and you had to really want to transfer the warez, overnight, for as long as it took. I quickly racked up a $300 phone bill one month (early 80's, so it was expensive), and got in trouble with my parents. So phone phreaking was also part of the early warez scene. I built a box that could generate 64 tones that could put the phone line into all kinds of states to allow various kinds of mayhem on the phone lines. This led to me being on the radar of some interesting individuals in the warez/phreak scene. In the late 80's/early 90's I once received a phone call from a "party line" with dozens of hacker types from all over the world just being obnoxious, it was kind of hilarious. I stayed on it for like 10 minutes and hung up, it was just a lot of noise. A couple months later my mother was visited by the FBI (I had just turned 18 and had already moved out), and she told me I needed to call them. Well it turns out that party-line call was started from a PBX at a top secret military facility. Apparently someone who had my contact info had hacked around the phone system and stumbled upon this PBX, not knowing where it was located. After telling me this the FBI agents wanted me to teach them all about "the underground" and they asked me about "warez" and "phone phreaks". I just had to say I didn't know what any of that was about, I was just a kid and I picked up the phone when it rang one day. That's the last I heard about it. The warez group FBR was legendary. I was somewhat involved with them in the late 80's. I remember hearing a story where they social engineered a secretary at a video game company. Someone mailed a modem to her (at her work) and instructed how to set it up as if they were working an IT job for the games company. They were able to transfer an upcoming game release over that modem, before the game was out. I don't remember all the details, but it was something along those lines, probably a lot more hilarious than I can remember now.