Wargames Dialer?

[fujidude]

Remember folks, back in the day (and until somewhat more recent times in fact) violating someone's copyright, without profiting from it, was only a civil matter; not criminal. I'm speaking from a United States perspective only though, and cannot comment on how it may have been in the United Kingdom or elsewhere.

Edited August 22, 2016 by fujidude

[Mclaneinc]

I believe from memory that Kevin was taken to court for selling games that were on a different media than they were sold on, as said it was the first ever case in the UK so there was no precedent over how it would go..

 

I'd ask the man but I've not seen him for 10yrs plus when we worked for the same company that TMR did.

 

I'm pretty certain that my memory is correct re the reasons they used to take him to court for, items were originally carts but were being sold on disk, the fact one game had not been released yet was by the by

 

Paul..

[tuf]

 

Seriously, you are the first guy I've heard that got busted for it, ok I lost track of some of the guys but that was way after the Amiga days when CC's were all the rage. I presume it never went further than an arrest?

 

Is this UK or US?

 

Back then it was new, arcade stuff was fresh, you enjoyed (mostly) the attempts to recreate it on your home computer, people had no concepts of trends yet, it was bold and daring.....Come on, Bionic Granny....That's as rad as it gets (and a poo C64 game as well)

 

USA - back when Sprint introduced it's long distance dialing cards. You called a 1-800#, then entered the number you wanted to call plus a 4 digit code. Kind of the inverse of war dialing we'd just call a BBS through the 800 number and try all 10,000 codes. When I'd wake up in the morning I had a ream of paper filled with valid codes - if the modem connected after dialing that meant a valid Sprint LD code. Easy peasy!

 

We did plenty of war dialing back then, and found all sorts of things like they did in the Wargames movie. I remember seeing the moving and thinking how woefully simplified the process was, and how outdated the hardware was at the time - but essentially they got it right. I remember finding things like a Vax that controlled the cities traffic lights, and a system that controlled the refrigeration units at a grocery store, etc. Most of it didn't have any authentication b/c who could imagine a kid would have access to the tech to actually connect to it?

 

The piracy thing is it's own story - but in general it was all in the spirit of local clubs and trading, things like that. People who tried to make money off of it were definitely not popular (or successful) where I came from. I think most if not all of the swap meets I attended back in those days took place in a school, church or synagogue - go figure.

Edited August 22, 2016 by tuf

[doctor_x]

The holy grail to me as far as looking for hacking/phreaking apps is a program called "Code Sucker" for the atari.

 

Happy Hacker would be nice to find as well.. Generated touch tones, all the box sounds, etc.. Neat little program.

[Brentarian]

The holy grail to me as far as looking for hacking/phreaking apps is a program called "Code Sucker" for the atari.

 

Happy Hacker would be nice to find as well.. Generated touch tones, all the box sounds, etc.. Neat little program.

I have Happy Hacker on disk and will try to find it tonight for you unless somebody else has it handy.

[doctor_x]

I have Happy Hacker on disk and will try to find it tonight for you unless somebody else has it handy.

 

wow.. that would be fantastic.. please do!!!!

[doctor_x]

And... The United States Secret Service also paid me a visit... Took my gear but I was never charged. I lost things that I can never get back likely - though I am trying very hard..

 

With that said - Blog/Forum 8bit underground advertising campaign will start over the weekend with fresh content going up in the coming weeks and HOPEFULLY some of you will come hang out for centered discussion on the topic..

[gozar]

And... The United States Secret Service also paid me a visit... Took my gear but I was never charged. I lost things that I can never get back likely - though I am trying very hard..

 

With that said - Blog/Forum 8bit underground advertising campaign will start over the weekend with fresh content going up in the coming weeks and HOPEFULLY some of you will come hang out for centered discussion on the topic..

 

The rss feed on the 8bitunderground is broken:

https://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.8bitunderground.com%2F%3Ffeed%3Drss2

[+x=usr(1536)]

Just saw the necro bump thread and it made me smile, I'm from Curt's days although the long range BBS thing wasn't really a huge thing here in the UK but it did flourish later under the C64 (later years iirc) and the Amiga where I saw it in action. I won't say names other than a cracking group called the Accumulators used AT&T cards to long distance BBS call, seemed so easy, get card number, read it out to operator, give number to connect to and off you went, obviously getting the cards was the hard bit and I have no clue of how and where as that sort of stuff was very much less than legal and not for me.

 

But yes, the old War games dialing BBS's to find stuff and getting LD codes was all part of the time period and seems after a watch of the film War games all cuddly and soft but a certain Mr R Branson may not agree as I seem to remember the lads chuckling over getting his personal AT&T card at the time..

 

There was something else you could do with AT&T (and certain other North American calling cards): make calls between countries in Europe or elsewhere by dialling a specific type of international operator but have the billing go to the North American card. The name for that type of operator escapes me, but it was possible to call from, say, Dublin to London (or Paris, or West Berlin, or elsewhere) and have it billed to an AT&T or other calling card issued by a North American telco.

 

I can only imagine how ungodly expensive the cost per minute would have been, but we weren't really terribly concerned with that. Probably more than calls to INMARSAT, if I had to guess, and depending on which region of the world a particular ship would have been located in, that was usually the most expensive call you could make per the local telephone directories' rates. Either way, it was fantastic for BBSing even if you were lucky to sustain a 300 baud connection over some of those calls.

 

My overwhelming memory of this: line noise. International circuits were horrible for that, and even ones within the country could be appalling depending on where you were calling and when.

 

Getting calling card numbers wasn't terribly difficult. We used to call loop numbers in the US for free - they didn't complete the call, so no billing occurred on our end. People sitting on conferences there were surprisingly willing to hand them out; we didn't really worry about whether or not they were with telco security or law enforcement because, well, we were three to six thousand miles away from them and under 18. Good luck with that extradition request.

 

There was one conference where AT&T security came on the line, threatened everyone with all sorts of horrible penalties and deprivations of liberty, then realised that not one person on the conference had anything even remotely approaching an American accent. Their responses to our taunts as we pointed out that they were utterly powerless to do anything were absolutely hysterical - we couldn't stop completely cracking up at them while quoting lines from Robocop and The Terminator. They finally got fed up enough with us that they rang off in a giant huff.

 

Those were fun times, and this has been a great thread to read through.

[Zonie]

I laugh when people complain about timeouts to reach a website - trying redialing a single line BBS for an hour straight on a slim line phone that didn't have redial because that feature was on luxury phones at the time until the Bell breakout and other companies could finally sell phones to use --- it used to be illegal to use a non-AT&T telephone on your home phone line, it was a violation of your usage agreement --- gosh the good old draconian AT&T days - when they even had their own police "the phone police" --- no joke...

 

 

 

Curt

Ain't that the truth!

[chad5200]

I had one for a8 called "Long Distance Bandit" (black type on orangish bg or something like that). I think I lost it in the 'Great Floppy Crash' of 1987.

 

I am going though my old collection of floppies. I found I have Long Distance Bandit v.3.4. My quick Google search came up empty for locating a copy online so I am uploading it here.

 

It requires BASIC XE which can be found here:

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/128541-basic-xe-rom/

 

 

 

 

Long Distance Bandit v3.4.atr

[chad5200]

I used to have a program called the Wargames Dialer. It was essentially a phreaking autodialer for the Atari 800/XL/XE computers.

 

It was a gray background/white text program and could be set-up to autodial numbers, then you could program pauses and then transmit numbers, wait for a connect to a BBS.

 

This was used back in the day when you used Sprint and MCI long distance dialing codes to make long distance calls for reduced costs vs. paying super high cost AT&T long distance calls.

 

 

I wonder if Long Distance Bandit is the same thing... since it matches the color scheme you mentioned (grey background / white text).

[doctor_x]

Shit im just now seeing Long Distance Bandit !!!!! THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR UPLOADING IT!!!!!!!

 

Never EVER heard of this one... 

 

THANK YOU!!!!!!!