POST // 006 - Handshake and Negotiation

A few months into my 8th grade year my dad thought it would be a good idea for me to start doing a little bit of work to make some cash. The middle school was only a few miles away from where he worked and for the last few years he was picking me up from school half the time after swim practice anyways. So, for those months that were not the swim season, he would pick me up after school and bring me back to work. He worked as the General Manager of a private grocery store chain. In this grocery store there was a video store, and that's where I spent a few hours of my days after school. I'd show up, clock in, check movies in or rent out movies. Mondays were the worst because that's when everyone was dropping off movies from the weekend. It was horrible, but I'm sure everyone appreciated a little extra help.

This was also during the era of VHS tapes, so there was a lot of frustration when people didn't rewind them. My rule for checking in videos was simple: If you turned in more than one tape that needed to be rewound, you got the fifty-cent rewind fee on all videos that needed to be rewound. We're not animals!

There were some state or federal rules that said that I couldn't work more than three hours on a school day and I couldn't work more than eighteen hours in a week and I couldn't work past 7 p.m. Those rules were different in the summer. On a few occasions the grocery store hired me to wear a costume and pass out candy. One time I was a dog, another time I was a chicken, and another time I was Barney the dinosaur. I'll tell you right now that grown adults will say some pretty mean things to a person in a Barney costume. I wonder if they'd say the same things if they knew the person in the costume was a fourteen-year-old. One time both Karl and I were paid to walk around and hand out candy. I dressed as a tomato and Karl got the banana costume. Those costumes are hot as hell and I often had to go stand in the dairy coolers so I didn't pass out.

Either way, I was making bank. Some days in the video store it was pretty quiet and I just stood there with the other person and we'd talk. There were two college-age young adults that I always enjoyed working with. One was a gal named Camille. She reminded me of Tia Carrere from Wayne's World. She would flirt with me and say things that my parents would not have approved of.

The other person was a guy named Josh. Josh and I usually talked about random stuff, life, and technology. Sometimes both Camille and Josh were working together and she liked to give him a lot of grief. They both went to the same college, but I don't think they knew each other outside of this job or had similar interests. Josh seemed to know a lot about computers and technology so I liked to ask questions. Sometimes I worried that I was annoying him or that I looked like an idiot, but at the same time I think he liked explaining things and sharing his opinions.

After I got my new Macintosh LC III, Josh and I were talking about it and I was telling him about the things that I was doing with it and some of the stuff I was doing in school. A few weeks later he brought me some floppy disks that had some games and programs. One of them was StuffIt Deluxe, an archiving and file compression application. Another one had After Dark, the fun screen saver utility. I brought them home and loaded them onto the computer and was able to explore and play with them. I was so excited to have new software to mess around with.

Some of this stuff I didn't know what to do with, like StuffIt, because I had never encountered compressed files. So, the next time I worked with Josh I had more questions to ask.

One of these conversations eventually led to America Online and what it was and how it worked. He told me that I needed a modem to connect and explained what a modem was and the very basics of how it worked. I'm sure he explained how America Online worked too, but I didn't have the money to pay for a service like that.

The conversation naturally shifted to other things I could connect to with a modem. Josh told me that he owned one and used it to connect to the college network through a local phone number. That wouldn't cost me anything. The next time Josh and I worked together he brought the modem. It was a Global Village TelePort 2400 baud modem for the Macintosh. Josh showed me the modem and explained how to connect it to my Mac. He told me that I could borrow it for a week if I wanted to try it out. He told me how to configure the computer to dial up the college system and gave me his username and password.

He specifically told me, "Be careful and don't get me into trouble!"

I agreed.

I really didn't know what to expect and I was slightly hesitant about borrowing his modem, but my curiosity pushed me forward and I thanked him. I smuggled the modem home that night when my dad drove us home and immediately took it down to my bedroom.

That weekend I connected the modem to the computer when everyone was either outside or out running errands. I connected the modem to the Apple ADB port, my keyboard into the modem, and the phone line from the modem to the wall. He had also provided another floppy disk that had a program called ZTerm. I followed Josh's directions and copied the application over to my computer. I opened ZTerm and typed:

ATDT7552020

and pressed Enter.

DIALING

The modem started screeching and dinging and beeping like crazy. I was expecting it based on the conversations we had, but I wasn't fully prepared for it.

CONNECT 2400/ARQ

Username:Password:

I typed in the username and password that Josh gave me and pressed Enter. A lengthy Bemidji State University VAX/VMS welcome screen scrolled across the terminal. I don't remember everything that it said, but there was a lot of information before I finally ended up at a command prompt.

I was in. I was connected to a world beyond my own computer. It was like the moment that the data screamed across Whistler's glasses. The Cuckoo's Egg came rushing back to me. All those moments in the book when people were connecting to remote systems, when the attacker was trying credentials. I was in. I was a part of that world. The world was more than just my own computer now.

I typed HELP and started exploring. I really didn't know what I was looking for, so I just started reading and trying things. One command led to another and I slowly started figuring out what I could do. I learned how to find out who was currently connected to the system and get a list of those people. I learned that I could type FINGER followed by someone's username and get more information about them. I also thought it was hilarious that there was an actual computer command called FINGER.

There was a lot more there that I didn't understand yet. It was a lot for one day so after about 30 minutes, I disconnected and slowly stepped away from the computer. I put on some shoes and went outside to walk around the neighborhood and think.

I found a little more time again that Sunday to try again. It was another 30 minutes doing the same things. This time I found someone who was connected and tried messaging them.

No Reply.

I called it a day and packed up the modem.

I returned the modem to Josh, but during Christmas break he brought it to me again and told me that he wasn't going to be around so he didn't need it until he came back. I had about three or four weeks to use it. I thanked him and asked him if there was any way to turn down or turn off that ungodly screeching.

He laughed. "Oh, that's the sound of the computers negotiating and handshaking. You can turn that off either through a dial-up command or in the settings."

He gave me the command to turn it off. "Instead of ATDT you need to use ATM0DT, then the number."

He explained the commands. The AT command wakes up the modem, DT tells the modem to use touch-tone signals, and M-zero turns the speaker completely off.

I spent that Christmas break connecting to the college VAX/VMS system and exploring a lot more of what I had discovered that first weekend. I figured out how Gopher worked and spent time navigating through Gopher pages. I learned more about the commands and programs that I had only started playing with before, but what fascinated me the most was being able to communicate with other people who were connected at the same time.

There was a program called PHONE that let me message them in real time. If someone phoned me, a green notification bar would pop up along the bottom of the screen. I'd type ANSWER and the screen would split, with each of us typing into our own part of the screen.

I don't know what kind of responses I was hoping for when I messaged people. We just had short normal conversations about the weather, what was happening the upcoming weekend, or what they were doing in school. It wasn't terribly interesting from an everyday life perspective, but it was fascinating that I was sitting in my bedroom having a conversation with someone through my computer.

After Josh got back from winter break I didn't see him that much. But he did buy a new, faster modem over break and offered to sell his old one to me for like fifty dollars. I ponied up the cash from all that video and costume work I'd been doing. I was the proud new owner of a modem. Not too long after that, Josh stopped working at the video store. I continued connecting to the college system for a while, but eventually his username and password stopped working. I don't know if his account expired, if he changed the password, or exactly what happened. One day I just couldn't get in anymore.

I still had the modem, but without an account or a service to connect to, there wasn't much I could do with it. I didn't have the money to pay for America Online and I didn't know about anything else I could connect to.

I realized that if I was going to keep living in this world, I was probably going to need the funds and means to get the things I needed when I doubted that my parents would buy them for me. How would I ever have explained why I wanted a modem? To connect to the local college, to talk to college girls, to navigate Gopher pages? I didn't really see the modem as useless now. Fifty dollars had bought me a chance to learn something new, and I still had a tool I could use again when I found something else to connect to.

So, for the summer and most of 9th grade, the modem sat in my closet.