St Patrick's day creation.

One of the earliest computer hackers started by diving in tips for good electronics the phone company threw out. He found the manual for the ordering system, with passwords written in. He got a used phone company van and would pick up what he ordered at the loading dock. He even figured out their reorder levels and would bring them down and sell them the stolen goods back to replenish stock. After he was caught, he went into the computer security business.

Steven Ruhl

My first program was written on the pencil-mark punch cards. It was read in by a card reader and then sent for processing at a university like yours was. Quite exciting at the time.

Big Clive

In the late 90's I lived in Shepherd's Bush in West London. I needed to make a call one day and went to a phone box on the Green. There was a young kid in there using the phone, and from watching the credit on the LCD display he was obviously phoning overseas - it was using money very rapidly. So I though I would wait as he wouldn't be long. After a minute, the phone started making chunking noises and to my amazement it was filling the rejected coin chute with pound coins. The kid was pulling them out and feeding them back in the slot. So I started watching more closely. He knew about what I assume was a feature to allow engineers to test phones without spending money. What you did was have your call, but then just before the credit all ran out, you press the "Follow on Call" button. Then you typed something like "#99#" (I forget the exact combination) and it gave you all of the money back! I tried it myself - strangely it only worked on 0207 phones, not 0208 (although it was probably 071 and 081 then). They had closed the loophole within a week...

Clive, you need more than green LEDs to make an authentic St.Patricks day video. You *also* need to be as pissed as a fart. It's pretty much mandatory.

Mark Dennehy

Super great logo! Who created it?

I was slightly to young to catch this stuff while it worked. I was fascinated by all the different coloured boxes tho. Was a fascinating insight into how the telecoms system worked. Several years later, I almost got kicked out of college for 'hacking' the computers... Many years later, I'm a software engineer. They shouldn't try to stifle this kind of exploration. It should be encouraged in some way.

JT

Oh this story remembered a story I had as a kid. In school I figured out how to bypass the admin on the PC network we had in the school. It essentially allowed me to get onto the internet because they didn't let those computers outside the schools intranet until the year after i transferred schools in 2002. Well me being me I was able to get cheat codes for the various game systems I owned. I played various shockwave games and stuff like that. I also figured out how hide a install of doom on the PC and play that too.

Very entertaining stories and great light set. Another trick back in the nineties was to fool the system on coin payment, by shorting the microphone to the metal frame on the telephone with a paper clip. This worked for sometime apparently, though I never tried personally, however it tended to damaged the microphone causing it to slowly fade away on volume until no one could hear you on the other end. Quite an annoying when you really need the phone. In time they managed to modify the phone to block the microphone functionality until you had actually paid. Not an issue any longer sadly as you are hard pressed to find a pay phone anywhere. Man I seem old.😿

Vaughn B.

I love listening to your stories! That string of lights is very festive, too. I bought a few random strings of green LEDs on eBay, but they're that nasty washed-out green. You've inspired me to make my own.

He's never dull :)

Tut tut, LOL.

Those turned out quite nice. I rather enjoy the stories you tell while building things like this. Very entertaining!

Scott Yeager