I was thinking for some reason recently about my felonious childhood. The statute of limitations has long since passed but it’s been so long that I rarely think of it anymore.

My mom was always an unapologetic media pirate. She’d rent videos and copy them to blank VHS tapes. She’d record stuff from HBO onto tapes. She’d copy Disney movies back before they sold them direct to consumer, and edit out the parts that scared me. (I don’t even remember exactly which ones. Some scene of the wicked stepmother from Snow White was replaced with VHF static. Some longer ones didn’t even have endings since the blank VHS tapes weren’t long enough. Does Bambi even have an actual ending?)

One of our first IBM PC’s came with a huge hard drive for the time. 100MB maybe. DOS partitions at the time could only be a certain maximum size- maybe 25MB or something like that, which I only remember because the guy who built us the computer loaded every partition up with a full library of pirated and freeware games and programs. It was an endless treasure trove starting from the D partition all the way up to H?

She ended up hiring the same guy to work at their small business at the time, and got him to teach me about the computer as part of his work in the office. He taught me the basics of BASIC. He taught me how to use the modem and dial up BBS’s, and the library at the time had a regularly printed list of local BBSs to dial into.

It was a wild time and I dug for anything fun or interesting that I could find. I found one BBS with a huge text library of conspiracy theories and X-Files level stories of alien encounters, top secret high technology experiments, details of cryptids of all sort.

But the real crazy stuff started when I found the warez BBSs and the sketchy stuff. By the time AOL was becoming widespread and started connecting to the internet, I found a program called AOHell. It was simple and did one thing.. generate valid but fake credit card numbers, along with plausible but random names and billing addresses to use to create fake accounts.

It’s crazy what you could get away with for a while there. Their dialup system didn’t support call tracing or caller ID yet. Their billing system didn’t verify payment information in realtime. So depending on when you created a fake account, you could rack up a ton of service time before they shut it down a few days later. And then you could just make another one and repeat it again and again.

I found IRC. I chatted with locals, distant strangers. I used some of the first VoiP apps to talk with people in Europe just to say hello, like it was a magical ham radio. Which it kind of was. The internet was still mainly populated with nerds. Smart people. The perverts were already there but they were nerdy and smart, too.

All of this was by the age of 14. There are a lot of reasons why I feel like a millennial, but I think that’s a big one. I may be a xenial but I’ve been chronically online for the majority of my conscious life, even if it was primitive at the start.