[eggy]

Great story. Glad you're posting here, a real treat. I used to belong to Echo in NYC, and met Mark that way once or twice.

I second your thoughts on 'Hackers' with the exception of its introduction of Angelina Jolie ;) For the record, there were no teenage girls like her around the hacking culture back then; what am I saying? There were no women at any of my meetups, period. I am glad to see that has changed, although there is a long way to go still.

I remember reading your words in my early 20s; it was motivating in a good way for me. It gave me a reason to introspect more on my activities, which were pretty misguided from 1978 on my Commodore PET with cassette drive to the computers I use nowadays.

Swapping prisoners: I had left NYU in 84. Before then you could, if you were so inclined, use your Bobst Library login credentials to telnet into the backend mainframe (Dec PDP 11 or Dec Vax's - can't remmeber). They had an off-campus 777 dial-up though. Ah, modem dial-up tones! I think somebody claimed to have logged on to a Houston NASA computer, and then the SYSADMIN popped on and asked that they identify themselves! ;)

[loydb]

You would not believe how many emails I got right after the movie came out from teenage boys wanting me to put them in touch with Jolie...

[eggy]

Oh, I would believe it alright. I would have emailed you too at the time. As much as she is the cliche Hollywood leading, she is not. There was enough of the fringe then, and still, that it appealed to my fringe self ;)

Anyway, I never took jobs in infosec, or IT after having had gained all of that experience with the exception of an DBA position when times were tough. I left computers for work, and only use them for fun - coding, animating, livecoding music and visuals, and amateur game dev. Oh, and geeky mathematics stuff!

I was jaded by the office cube syndrome, and web dev becoming the 2000s equivalent of becoming a word proccessor in the 80s (remember that? Learn Word or WordPerfect and earn big salaries?). Nobody correlated it with just transferring typing skills to a computer. There was the occasional hacker/guru who wrote mail merge macros and such, but after the low-hanging fruit was had, it was spellcheck all day!

I went on to do things like technical design, engineering and fabrication of show action equipment, technical diving to service underwater electrical and hydraulics, rope access work, and multimedia, and other stuff where I could apply code in creative ways - automation, math visualizations, and multimedia.

Can you introduce me to Angelina? Oh, never mind, Brad would kick my butt!