I caught a show on the ABC last night called In The Realm Of Hackers, about a couple of Hackers in Melbourne who got into all sorts of systems worldwide between 1985 and 1991 or so.

Was very interesting to me that there was hacking going on back then, and they were doing it from Commodore 64's with a 300 baud modem! Forget Quakeworld being old skool in that perspective!

I recorded it, but I'm not sure whether trog would legally let me upload it, considering that's legally questionable. I'm sure many of you would find it interesting, except for it being re-enacted quite cheesily.

Sounds great! Id like to see what they did back then :D

Have you got webspace you can upload it to?

Go ELECTRON!!

Mind you hacking on a C64, with no "Script kiddie" tools, would have taken some l33t skill.

Image what those dudes could do NOW!!!

yeah I saw it, but the acting was so cheesy that half way thru I turned over and watched Big Brother Uncut, lol

I'm yet to convert it to an appropriate size for up/downloading, and I don't have any webspace or a broadband account, but I'll see if I can get a couple of friends to wrangle something for me over the weekend

i caught the show too, but missed the first 15 mins and then quickly got a tape into the vcr and started recording. so could ya tell me what happened in the first 15 mins. could ya make the file of super high quality, i'm a 56ker but prefer to have quality then quantity.
yeah they would have had some elite skills.
and the size of the modems, woooooo....... bigger then the f***ing vcrs these days.

twas a good insight, if you get a spot to upload it to let us now. FYI www.freewebs.com can offer 100mb of free hosting.. :)

what is a hacking?

Shut up.

Yeah, i saw that show. That show was cool.

Btw, both Electron and Pheonix now work with the guys who caught them.

How did the net work back then? I mean, they were just typing s*** to each other like on chat in places...was it just a huge chatroom or something?

did u have to ask that question. go to a friggin hack site, or seach in search engines for docs to explain it.

What, my question? Hey, it's better than 'what is a hacking?'.

it was like... BBS and stuff. i was pretty young when that stuff was around so i can't remember much of it.
(BBS = bulletin board systems)
just a place to host files and text files ... you'd have to dial into someone's host (probably their modem too, i can't remember much again) and they had all time limits and stuff. so downloading a megabyte took forever.

there's my memories.

The only way to get onto the internet was through Universities etc, there was no public access.

It used TCP/IP still, that's why they could telnet into stuff like NASA and other universities.

The show was pretty good, it would be good to see it again

I've converted it to an OGM file, XviD/Ogg, it's a bit over 350MB, but I don't have anywhere to upload it to given I'm a poor dialup user and daren't use my work setup. Anyone in the north eastern suburbs of Adelaide who wants to upload it somewhere for me, I'll drop around the CD and you can do what you want with it.

It was recorded off the TV at a bitrate of 1000kbps, then single pass converted with a quantizer of 3 - if that means nothing to anyone, not DVD quality, but not too ugly either.

i have a website that has no limits and if somone is willing to upload it i have the space to put it somewhere.

Yeah, but is it strictly legal?

Just before my time...

But if you want further reading..

Try these:

The Underground Book

This was the actual book this was based upon.

I would also recommend reading 'The Hacker Crackdown' by Bruce Sterling

Which is freely avaliable from:
http://promo.net/pg/

Look for an book mirror inside Australia its under zip files hack10.zip, hack11.zip and I think hack12.zip?

As far as what they used to do. From what I have sourced out from numerous works. There used to be a network called the X.25 network this was the Internet or what might become the Internet eventually?

Hackers used to obtain access to this network. In Australia there was firstly Minerva? According to the book. They used to have accounts on there.

But because the universities and the CSIRO had these it was one of those things to do for the hey day.

These days the X.25 is used for EFTPOS transactions I think. As far as if its accessable? Who knows?

Later there was AUSTPAC? I think. Damned if I know what it stands for.

~Kimbo~

i don't care, as if the anyone look into it, hah.