4 ms·
$6 an hour using CompuServe, IIRC. Dang I'm old.
by genwin 13y ago
$6 an hour using CompuServe, IIRC. Dang I'm old.
- stormbrew 13y agoI used up $1000 worth of hours on compuserve in a month once. My parents weren't happy.
- lurkinggrue 13y agoI just got my hands on starter kits and sucked them dry over the weekend.
- DanBC 13y agoIn those days credit card checking was done offline using Luhn algorithms. So you could download a program to generate numbers, and use made up data, to get free illegal access to Compuserve. Sometimes the accounts lasted a few months before being closed.
- waterlesscloud 13y agoThere was an algorithm in a certain "Hacker Journal" to generate said numbers. Combine that with some valid prefixes (the first 4 digits, which indicate the issuer) and you'd pass most tests at the time.
- Andrenid 13y agoI pretty much owe my career in tech to those programs. We were too poor for internet, but dad had a work computer at home. Fake CCs kept me online and let me upload the HTML pages I'd made offline, and chat to people who taught me everything.
- AJ007 13y agoI had a similar experience (about half as much.) Then there was a few times I dialed long distance BBSs.. My parents were so cheap they refused to buy a second phone line for years. In retrospect they probably enjoyed not being called by their friends or telemarketers.
- bashcoder 13y agoAlso reminds me of when Genie offered gopher access (also old).
- DanBC 13y ago1988 they were charging $11 per hour! (That's roughly $21 per hour). They had "more than 250,000 subscribers". http://imgur.com/KCLwBzy http://imgur.com/KCLwBzy Notable quote, written over 20 years ago, from that image (about BIX, $9 per hour, which grew from a magazine.): "This is the computer industry as it used to be: people sharing ideas and solutions without the greed and grit associated with today's corporate driven, litigation-laced, industry"