This is a story I like to tell because it gives me a little hacker cred.

When I was a kid, my older brother set up a BBS called The Arena. My “handle” was Thy Gladiator. Why was it “thy” instead of “the?” Because I thought it made me seem cool and smart for some reason. My brother was The Metallic Hawk. A much cooler name.

Let me backup and explain what a BBS is. In the 80s, before the web, you would use a modem to dial up to a bulletin board system. It was a server that you “dialed in” to and got ab all text-based interface and you could read and leave messages, or you could upload and download pictures and software. Basically a forum like Reddit, but a lot less traffic and the visuals were all done in text (ASCII art we called it). Here’s the Wikipedia article on BBSes if you want to go down the rabbit hole. We hosted ours on an Atari 1200XL

One of the things we did was that you could crack into a piece of software, usually a gam, and put a little splash screen up that said “cracked by” as a way to sort of tag the software. We did a lot of that.

But we eventually stopped doing it, and I found out later that it was because we got a cease and desist letter from the FBI for pirating software.