i remember those days. i was into things. i listened to Inf. Soc. and kmfdm. i sat in a dirty corner at my fathers house on my leading edge 286, with those awful 5.25" drives, one with dos, one with procomm plus, plotting ways to reconnect to the same line after my 60 minute freenet session was over. i remember those awful freenet picnics, where some of the peoples skin was paler than the plain white t-shirts i used to wear all the time. the cliques, the loners, the fact that we all knew ourselves as ap035 and sa131 and cl762. 1200 baud. warez boards that let you in if you knew what InC and ACiD stood for. hacking irc. social engineering accounts from people you hated, or better yet, taking the other phone and calling them, because their mommy and daddy didn't want the call waiting turned off. wondering if my cpu would crash, because the buffer might overload while i was capturing uuencoded porn. the green trench coat that lasted me through high school. then there were the text files. everything i learned about making my own drugs, picking locks, exploiting unix and bestiality i learned on searchlight boards, wildcat hacks and usenet, when people actually had something useful to say. those days are gone. like most of the other kids that were around during that era, i got a real job in computers, and although i still sit in front of this damned box all night long when the girl's at school, it's not the same. freenet's gone in cleveland. the people i used to look forward to chatting with at 3 am have moved on, some for better, some for worse, some for AOL. don't get me wrong, everyone deserves an IPO, right? cheers for linux and rob malda and jon katz. props to search engines and al4a. palm pilots and G4's and transmeta are alright in my book. but they'll never replace the fondness i have for CGA graphics and copycon autoexec.bat. so here's to all of us that read CdC when it was new, to people who actually knew what a SysOp was and definitely to anyone that had a TI-994a. one of these days i'm going to pull that 286 out of the attic and write text files on it. maybe somebody will know what the hell i'm talking about. /\ _| |_ _|__ __|_ __ | | _| |_ | | | | | | /\ | | | | | | | | | | | |___ | | | | | | | | | | |_|_ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | _| | |_|_ | | |_ | | |_| | | | | | CLEVELAND FREE-NET | | COMMUNITY COMPUTER SYSTEM | |____________________________________| brought to you by Case Western Reserve University Community Telecomputing Laboratory ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ .~. Daniel Nagy /V\ nothing@apk.net / \ *nix admin / cold fusion development. /( )\ ^`~'^ Any opinions expressed are mine, and not those of MediaZen Inc.