Same here. I was a relentless script kiddy who flunked out of grade 10 because of undiagnosed ASD, but having “tech skills” in the early 90s meant I had no problem finding random IT jobs and working up to a career in Gov IT.
I remember hitting a point where there we no more local ISPs who would give us an account, so we’d go to the library and use BO to steal dial up accounts from random companies (always targeting local companies we hated at the time), which we’d keep in a txt file via an IRC fileserv and rotate through. Kept us online until we got better at not getting caught.
Of course all that these days would get you put in prison but back then even when we got caught it was more of a “silly teenagers, don’t do that again or we’ll tell your parents… by the way, can you help fix our printer?”
I remember hitting a point where there we no more local ISPs who would give us an account, so we’d go to the library and use BO to steal dial up accounts from random companies (always targeting local companies we hated at the time), which we’d keep in a txt file via an IRC fileserv and rotate through. Kept us online until we got better at not getting caught.
Of course all that these days would get you put in prison but back then even when we got caught it was more of a “silly teenagers, don’t do that again or we’ll tell your parents… by the way, can you help fix our printer?”