Telnet

I started playing with the internet around 1996 when I was in 6th grade. We had just upgraded out of Windows 3.1 and AOL was still the unfortunate leader in Internet Service Providers. Within a month, I had already gained access to one of my friend's accounts by guessing his password (it was the name of his girlfriend). The next year, I tricked another friend into thinking I had hacked into his account by employing a discovery I had made regarding the font AOL used (a capital i looked exactly like a lowercase l, allowing nearly indistinguishable account names). But since then, I have an almost computer vigilante approach to these kinds of things so I've never exploited them.

AOL at the time did not allow easy access to the open internet; the interface focused on content housed at AOL. So in early high school, I figured out how to use Telnet, a network protocol to access unix-like servers and simple network devices. Back then, of course no one encrypted anything, so I was able to bore myself by accessing servers of the local community college and play online games and whatnot. Fortunately I had no inclination to do anything malicious (and indeed, this was the golden time before cybercrime - identity theft was unheard of).

For some reason, as the internet matured, I became less interested in deciphering its inner workings. I never really cared much for trends like slashdot, "l33t" speak, or webpage design. I was also pretty late to investigate things like Napster and Facebook. I did however latch onto blogging really early. I began blogging a year after blogger was released and have stuck with it since, avoiding Xanga, Livejournal, and Myspace. I kept a daily blog through much of high school and had a patchy time during college, but now I'm back.