Wargames Dialer?

[JayoK]

Ha! I remember making the same move! I lived in Anchorage, Alaska in the 80's (and beyond) and you want to talk about some damn expensive phone calls. There was long distance, then there was long distance TO/FROM ALASKA. There was only one LD carrier - ALASCOM - which was owned by RCA at the time. Their monopoly made the phone calls as expensive as calling a foreign country. A company called "GCI" started up LD service with the 1-800 number and the digit-codes like you're talking about.

 

The Apple II guys (weren't many Atari guys in high school) had the Novation Applecat 212 modem that had a (I think) ST sound chip in it and they were all into the "phreaking" scene. I wasn't aware that there was even a single wardialer for the 8-bit Atari.

 

I did spend a lot of time (smiling) with "Mikeydialer" on the ST back in those days. I eventually got "busted" through a RAT. They had no proof. I was 15 anyway, so I couldn't have been prosecuted. The bastard Apple user "friend" who turned me onto it got busted (he was 15 as well) and told the GCI folks that I was the ringleader who turned him onto it. I had to go down to the offices (with my parents, of course) and was told to cease and desist, and threatened - in a nice way - with prosecution. They handed me a thick tractor-feed printout of "illegal" calls and asked me to circle any that I had made. I recognized many big-time pirate Atari BBS numbers that I had been using. I did circle a couple numbers (wondered why later) but did not admit to the pages of all-night calls I'd made.

 

Now GCI is pretty much the monopoly, esp since they bought the cable company years ago.

 

Never got prosecuted. Sometimes get those same feelings again when bittorrent is running, though...

 

 

That's a pretty cool story - and one to tell the Grandkids eventually.

[doctor_x]

Curt and anyone else... Would love to have you over at the 8 Bit Underground, where I am working to assemble a catalog of just such software as wargames dialers, code scanners, etc for various systems (8 and 16 bit only)..

 

Its slow going as its only me working on the project with other stuff going on as well - but it is progressing...

 

URL in my signature.

[Bryan]

Man, I knew guys in high school who did so much illegal stuff. There were guys who would buy new computer systems using the information from credit card "carbons" and have it delivered to an empty house where they would meet the UPS guy like they lived there. One guy even ran off to Canada for a few months when he got tipped off that officers were looking for him.

 

It's been a long time since long-distance service was so valuable you would put substantial effort into stealing it. I knew several guys who had to hit all the top pirate boards several times a week and would use LD codes to do it. You had to find your own because if you got one off a BBS it was probably weeks old and already deactivated or being traced. I remember games were like currency. If you had something new, you had real trading power.

[atarifan49]

--- gosh the good old draconian AT&T days - when they even had their own police "the phone police" --- no joke...

 

The "Phone Police" - that reminds me of my favorite WKRP episode where Johnny Fever was panicking that they phone police were coming after him.

[Loyal Atarian]

Someplace I have a copy of Modem Combat for the 800, I need to dig it up...

 

Rumor has it, someone within Atari wrote a demo of a 2 player version of Star Raiders that worked over modem's, I am scouring the mainframe archives trying to find it.

 

Curt

 

 

How about a nice game of chess?..........

Let's play global thermonuclear war.

 

tic-tac-toe?

It's not on the list!

 

 

modem star raiders would definitely be really awesome! Hope you find it Curt!

 

 

Occassionally the line would get interrupted and you'd hear someone from Sprint or MCI saying "hello???" and I'd do a Matthew Broderick, grab the phone, unplug it and hold it in my lap wondering if that was going to be the night that the police were going to come and ring the doorbell and I'd be sooooooo busted.

 

 

Ha! I remember making the same move! I lived in Anchorage, Alaska in the 80's (and beyond) and you want to talk about some damn expensive phone calls. There was long distance, then there was long distance TO/FROM ALASKA. There was only one LD carrier - ALASCOM - which was owned by RCA at the time. Their monopoly made the phone calls as expensive as calling a foreign country. A company called "GCI" started up LD service with the 1-800 number and the digit-codes like you're talking about.

 

The Apple II guys (weren't many Atari guys in high school) had the Novation Applecat 212 modem that had a (I think) ST sound chip in it and they were all into the "phreaking" scene. I wasn't aware that there was even a single wardialer for the 8-bit Atari.

 

I did spend a lot of time (smiling) with "Mikeydialer" on the ST back in those days. I eventually got "busted" through a RAT. They had no proof. I was 15 anyway, so I couldn't have been prosecuted.

[...]

Never got prosecuted. Sometimes get those same feelings again when bittorrent is running, though...

 

This all seems familiar to me. Exact same feeling with bittorrent. Used to go on a local BBS where hundreds of people were constantly posting "phreak codes", sometimes, it seemed, a thousand at a time. That, along with "G-files" which included forbidden knowledge such as the still controversial but possibly outdated Anarchist's Cookbook. It's ok to read it, just not ok to follow through and do any of it.

 

I used to print out pages of the dialing codes, and in high school for a year or two, hang out by the pay phones, allowing people to make free calls. Hey, information still wants to be free.

 

Used to use the Wargames type dialer for the A8, but stopped when one of the codes I found that I had been using.. well, the guy who got the bill called the house phone, and spent 20 minutes talking with me and threatening me. At 16 I was quite scared and stuck to the online code postings from that point on, which were plentiful..

 

I'm sure I still have this program on a disk somewhere, but, I ruined a 1050 drive last time I went searching for a program on the old floppies. It prompted me to go get one of the last remaining XF551 drives at Toys R Us sometime in early 1993. It was the last new Atari peripheral I ever bought, a display model, discounted to $79. The next problem I came across was the XF551 couldn't read double density disks, which had the files I was looking for. Sigh!

 

Another good topic would involve how to determine if it is worth it to stick a 5.25" floppy into your disk drive after nearly twenty years of not having used the disk.

 

 

 

Oh, by the way... Curt? The reason I replied to this post is your post reminded me of an online game made exclusively for the A8's that was hosted on CompuServe in the mid to late 1980s.

 

It was a World War I combat airplane simulator, I forget the name. Up to 16 players could play against each other at once. This was around 1986. I remember reading that it was made only for Atari 8bit computers because they were the only platform that could handle this type of graphical real-time online multi-user play.

 

Personally, I only had a 1200 baud modem at the time, but many people were already using 2400 baud and if I remember correctly 9600 baud, which put me at a disadvantage in the game. I played it only for about a week before giving up.

 

Anyone remember the name of this CompuServe A8-exclusive multi-player online game?

 

Could it be made to work again today without using CompuServe's servers?

Edited March 8, 2010 by Loyal Atarian

[SoulBlazer]

Just found this thread for the first time. Great reads here.

 

I wasn't quite old enough to really get into the whole BBS thing...but I did steel some things.....

 

Someone mentioned that games were gold back then, and that was so true. New games were expensive, and being a kid money was tight. Back when my parents got me a C64 in 1986, my Dad aidded me by getting from someone at work hundreds of copied games! Probaly he didn't see the harm in it either. The few 'real' C-64 games I had like M.U.L.E. and so on I'd trade with kids at school (I was around 12-14 at the time).

 

We did pay for, however, a monthly subscrption to Loadstar, a monthly 'magazine on disk' (remember those? )

 

Back when we got our first IBM clone in 1989, again, my Dad got alot of games copied from people.

 

I kinda feel bad about that now, but it's amazing how common and widepsread that warez was back in those days....

 

I used BBS's a little in the early 90's -- I lived in NH so we had a number of local boards to use. I never tried to call LD or hack anything, I was good in that regard.

 

But when I got Prodigy back in early 1992 and got online with it -- different story!

 

At first, it was a cheap online service where you paid X ammount of dollars a month and you could use thier forums, download their programs, do online chat, and so on all unlimited, as long as you called a local number. We had a blazing fast 9600 modem for this also. Mind you, this was a closed service, there was no access to the WWW/Usenet/Internet. I didn't get to the new until I went to college in 1994.

 

But not very long after I got Prodigy, they changed the plans around and made it more expensive to use it, and charged you for time online and all that. So to help myself and friends out, I would get demo copies of the software that you could get any Sears and other stores, make a fake account, and use the free time, and then move on to another one when done. My friends and I also found a trick where you could log into one person's ID and leave a e-mail or messages for each other without being charged or paying for it.

 

More then once someone from Prodigy would call or send US mail trying to get information on this 'Joe Smith' and I'd play dumb about it. Ah, the good old days.

[joeventura]

Yes I used that type of software, mostly to get LD Dialing codes,

When I moved to the Carolinas in the late 1980s I never paid for long distance calling thanks to those programs! hehehehh

[HiroProX]

Occassionally the line would get interrupted and you'd hear someone from Sprint or MCI saying "hello???" and I'd do a Matthew Broderick, grab the phone, unplug it and hold it in my lap wondering if that was going to be the night that the police were going to come and ring the doorbell and I'd be sooooooo busted.

 

 

 

Curt

 

Heh, nothing like that to make your sphincter pucker. Lots of close calls, but it was deciding to use the VAX in military school as a rendering co-processor for my A500 that got me nailed.

[atari frank]

I laugh when people complain about timeouts to reach a website - trying redialing a single line BBS for an hour straight on a slim line phone that didn't have redial because that feature was on luxury phones at the time until the Bell breakout and other companies could finally sell phones to use --- it used to be illegal to use a non-AT&T telephone on your home phone line, it was a violation of your usage agreement --- gosh the good old draconian AT&T days - when they even had their own police "the phone police" --- no joke...

 

 

 

Curt

Bell could tell how many telephone sets you had in the house because all phones were made by Western Eletric and when the tester ran a MLT test (metalic loop test)they could tell from the resistance they got back from each ringer in the house."the phone police still exist"

[JonnyBritish]

I used to have a program called the Wargames Dialer. It was essentially a phreaking autodialer for the Atari 800/XL/XE computers.

 

It was a gray background/white text program and could be set-up to autodial numbers, then you could program pauses and then transmit numbers, wait for a connect to a BBS.

 

This was used back in the day when you used Sprint and MCI long distance dialing codes to make long distance calls for reduced costs vs. paying super high cost AT&T long distance calls.

 

So you'd use the Wargames dialer, dial into the Sprint or MCI long distance connection 800#, then enter a sequentially generated Spring/MCI long distance code, then dial the telco# of a BBS number - if the number was busy it would hang up and try again, if the code was invalid it would generate a new LD dialing code and try again, if successful, it would be printed out onto your printer.

 

You'd run this all through the night and the next morning you'd have 3-5 brand spanking new long distance codes...

 

For you newbies, weenied on the internet, or using long ISP dial-ups... well back during the BBS days (you know what a BBS is, right?) were local in each state, so to call them you had to incur HUGE long distance charges, so getting long distance dialing codes was like getting someone's VISA/MC #... they were worth their weight in gold, you could use them to dial to out of state BBS' but you could also use them as trading fodder to get secret access on BBS' to their secret pirated software directories.

 

Now in this day in age, the program is useless, but it was a very big part of my early days of modem'ing and BBS'ing and I'd like to find a copy of it.

 

 

Curt

 

 

Earlier this year I acquired the entire archive of the Milwaukee Atari user group which is about 1600 floppies. I have to imagine the program is on these disks somewhere. I'll add it to my list to search. My aim is to get all these disks converted to ATR's and stored to one DVD which can be offered to the community complete with disk file lists so its all searchable etc

 

A dream maybe but 1600 disks is a huge goldmine of lost files and utils etc

[Curt Vendel]

If you need help with those, let me know, I'd love to scour through that stuff! :-)

 

I used to have a program called the Wargames Dialer. It was essentially a phreaking autodialer for the Atari 800/XL/XE computers.

 

It was a gray background/white text program and could be set-up to autodial numbers, then you could program pauses and then transmit numbers, wait for a connect to a BBS.

 

This was used back in the day when you used Sprint and MCI long distance dialing codes to make long distance calls for reduced costs vs. paying super high cost AT&T long distance calls.

 

So you'd use the Wargames dialer, dial into the Sprint or MCI long distance connection 800#, then enter a sequentially generated Spring/MCI long distance code, then dial the telco# of a BBS number - if the number was busy it would hang up and try again, if the code was invalid it would generate a new LD dialing code and try again, if successful, it would be printed out onto your printer.

 

You'd run this all through the night and the next morning you'd have 3-5 brand spanking new long distance codes...

 

For you newbies, weenied on the internet, or using long ISP dial-ups... well back during the BBS days (you know what a BBS is, right?) were local in each state, so to call them you had to incur HUGE long distance charges, so getting long distance dialing codes was like getting someone's VISA/MC #... they were worth their weight in gold, you could use them to dial to out of state BBS' but you could also use them as trading fodder to get secret access on BBS' to their secret pirated software directories.

 

Now in this day in age, the program is useless, but it was a very big part of my early days of modem'ing and BBS'ing and I'd like to find a copy of it.

 

 

Curt

 

 

Earlier this year I acquired the entire archive of the Milwaukee Atari user group which is about 1600 floppies. I have to imagine the program is on these disks somewhere. I'll add it to my list to search. My aim is to get all these disks converted to ATR's and stored to one DVD which can be offered to the community complete with disk file lists so its all searchable etc

 

A dream maybe but 1600 disks is a huge goldmine of lost files and utils etc

[Mclaneinc]

I remember seeing War Games in the day and so wanting to be in the States to try out that sort of stuff

 

Eventually I built one of our 300 baud modems and connected to a certain er well known naughty boy and downloaded Buck Rogers, it was a wow experience for me at that time, on par with printing out naughty digitized gray scale pictures om my Epson ultra noisy printer.

 

Or hearing Easy Lover coming from my 8bit..Amazing old fart stuff.

 

After I got married all those centuries ago we went to Canada to see our relations in Toronto, knowing I was a computer geek my relations took me and my wife Cidy to the pictures and that's where I saw Tron for the first time, my jaw dropped when I saw that film but what made me laugh was that we went to the local Mall the next day and every computer shop had "Access program Tron" or "access program Clu" on their screens.

 

Such wonderful times, I always wish for a retro machine just so I could go back and enjoy the experience of the home computer start all over again. Kids today just think the Xbox has always been there

[bandit]

I used to have a program called the Wargames Dialer. It was essentially a phreaking autodialer for the Atari 800/XL/XE computers.

 

 

 

Curt

 

Yea I used that back in the day, and did find a few numbers to try out, It was a basic program, You had to have a printer connected and the 850 was a must, I later modified it for some reason, but I still have the unmodded version which I will attach.

WARGAME.zip

[doctorclu]

I used to have a program called the Wargames Dialer. It was essentially a phreaking autodialer for the Atari 800/XL/XE computers.

 

 

 

Curt

 

Yea I used that back in the day, and did find a few numbers to try out, It was a basic program, You had to have a printer connected and the 850 was a must, I later modified it for some reason, but I still have the unmodded version which I will attach.

 

Wow good find! I was just about going to look through my archive but there that was.

 

 

I remember seeing War Games in the day and so wanting to be in the States to try out that sort of stuff

 

...

 

After I got married all those centuries ago we went to Canada to see our relations in Toronto, knowing I was a computer geek my relations took me and my wife Cidy to the pictures and that's where I saw Tron for the first time, my jaw dropped when I saw that film but what made me laugh was that we went to the local Mall the next day and every computer shop had "Access program Tron" or "access program Clu" on their screens.

 

...

 

LOL Accessing Clu.. yep, between Wargames and TRON I think those were the biggies for getting people into computers.

[phaxda]

Aw, someone got to it before I did! Also my very favorite episode. Here is a YouTube clip:

 

 

--- gosh the good old draconian AT&T days - when they even had their own police "the phone police" --- no joke...

 

The "Phone Police" - that reminds me of my favorite WKRP episode where Johnny Fever was panicking that they phone police were coming after him.

[_The Doctor__]

Aw, someone got to it before I did! Also my very favorite episode. Here is a YouTube clip:

 

 

--- gosh the good old draconian AT&T days - when they even had their own police "the phone police" --- no joke...

 

The "Phone Police" - that reminds me of my favorite WKRP episode where Johnny Fever was panicking that they phone police were coming after him.

 

 

The phone police tracked your ringer equivalency load as well, they still print that info on some phones today.

 

Back when you had the numbers listed on the BBS for phreaking, all you needed was the trace test number. Dial the trace test number then the code, rising tone leave it alone, falling down go to town. It was that simple. You could also make/receive calls using homemade box that did not let the voltage drop on the line so the exchange did not register the call went thru.

[SoulBlazer]

I thought for my 2500 post here (go me!) I'd bump this old thread for the new people to the forum to read. Lot of great stories here.

[jblenkle]

I remember that program. I used to love playing with it. I remember dialing the number starting range of the local NBA arena...finally connected with a computer that required a password. kind of scary...

[tschak909]

I remember calling the guy who first figured out how to program the 835/1030 modem from basic, he was the same person who wrote the AMIS bbs program and he was from Michigan, but I cant rem his name. He was pretty annoyed a 10 year old kid was bugging him, but there was something I couldn't figure out from his bbs listing and I needed his help. I also remember calling the Analog offices to figure out how to get a pure 2600hrz tone from the Atari 8bit, but what I didn't know is that trick was outdated even in the early 80's. I wrote a couple different war dialers for the 1030 modem (the 835 was not capable of tone dialing!). I even remember writing a rudimentary brute force hacking program that would continually log onto Compuserve and try to hack out passwords. Later I turned my hand relatively legal modem fun with bbs programs and especially loved the Modrona Marsh bbs which even stored it's most used files in the extra memory above basic or whatever it was as a mini ram disk and had self deleting code in basic which I thought was awesome back then because everything would run on a 130xe with ramdisk and you could use all other storage for "warez." The sysop of Modrona Marsh BBS in Torrence,CA wrote a great tutorial on programing the 1030 modem's T: handler for Antic magazine if you care to look it up.

 

Anyway, we used to call all over the country without a care and trade passwords, codez, and even make conference calls to trade info without a thought for the poor saps who would later get the bill. I can only imagine where all that would get us nowadays (probably a jail sentence!!), but those were innocent times. How else could we destroy the Atari 8bits market in the US if we didnt call around to download the latest games and later many games that never saw the light of day in the US anyway.

 

Those were different times. Phreaking kind of died out in the later part of the 16 bit age. By then bbs's even pirate ones were prevalent everywhere and many of the pirate groups of today started during the Amiga/ST era so things were organized and got around. The rise of Usenet and the internet in general in the early 90's started working against bbs's too.

 

Jim Steinbrecher. He also wrote AMODEM 4.2, and a few others. Ran Sector One BBS (and software company where he sold AMIS and AMODEM for a number of years.)

 

AMODEM (Atari Modem) would go through a shitload of tweaks from just about everybody under the sun, different version decendents from 1982 until 1986 or so...

 

-Thom

[kogden]

Never actually had a war dialer for my 8-bit.... Had a couple for MS-DOS. I wrote one for the Apple Newton a long time ago which was entertaining. I never had an 850 and just had a flaky 300 baud modem. Did most of my BBSing from the 286 or the STs we had back then.

[+David_P]

I thought for my 2500 post here (go me!) I'd bump this old thread for the new people to the forum to read. Lot of great stories here.

 

Really, this thread would be more appropriate for post #2600...

[doctor_x]

kinda funny to bump a topic after so long... But after a bit of a hiatus this project is back on.... blog is back up as are forums.. address in my sig.

 

I'm still looking for this type of stuff and if any of you since this original topic have stumbled across anything I'd sure love to get a copy.

[doctorclu]

Got me curious. Have to see what I have on some old disks.

 

To matter the fact, at this point, wouldn't it be great if we just put our old disks on here, with no personal information, for people to look through?

[Lynxpro]

Someplace I have a copy of Modem Combat for the 800, I need to dig it up...

 

Rumor has it, someone within Atari wrote a demo of a 2 player version of Star Raiders that worked over modem's, I am scouring the mainframe archives trying to find it.

 

Curt

 

Since this thread was bumped, I thought I'd ask if anything's been found yet.

[+Stephen]

Got me curious. Have to see what I have on some old disks.

 

To matter the fact, at this point, wouldn't it be great if we just put our old disks on here, with no personal information, for people to look through?

Ping me sometime - I have a handful of disks with Genie information as well as jokes captured from local BBSes in late 87 to 88. I do need to scrub a little info, but I want to get these posted ASAP. Good news is, they are backed up to PC, so I don't have to worry about any disks failing.