You don't have to be that old to remember those times. I was only 8 years old when this article came out, and I remember around that time my dad mentioned this new thing called "the Internet". He described as being like the BBSs I was used to, but world-wide. About 8 months later we got an AOL account.

I lived in rural Georgia and ran up a $600 phone bill dialing long-distance to an AOL connection the first month we had "the Net".

You're not old enough, it appears. I thought everyone knew how to use a template hacker and phreak all their LD calls back then :-)

haha, yeah; didn't even know the term "phreak" until, say, 3 months after when I stumbled across the old cDc text files.