Are you old enough to relate? The horrors of dial-up

Short story:
Mate bought BT Engineer codes back in 1993 to download 24/7 and lost everything.

Long story:
Back in 1993 I'd got a computing buddy called 'Wires' because of the abundance of wires all around his house and I used to go down at least twice a week.
This was a time when 5 of us had chipped in for a 1x CD burner that cost £5000 plus 2x1gb SCSI hard drives, cost £1000 each, to help burn to it.
We were going to have it for one week each and I was going to use it for making CD's of local artists that I'd recorded but I never got to my go.
One Saturday morning at 7am I got a call from his next door neighbour who I worked with asking if I knew why there were 4 Police cars and a van outside his house!

It transpired that he had been buying BT Engineer codes for £50 a month so he could keep his MODEM permanently attached to Bulletin Boards in America so he could download software.
When the Police entered his property he had got over 100 copies of Encarta 93 ready to dispatch for £50 a disc and then loads of other stuff going out.
They took all his gear including my 1/5th of the CD burner and all because of his 1440 MODEM and downloading (might have been 2880 at that time!).
They took him to court, fined him very heavily and he ended up losing his home.
 
Damn I had a similar friend who used to download from BBs and sell pirate Amiga games all whilst living with his Dad. Random people used to pop round his flat at random intervals to buy disks at £1 a go. He even advertised it in the local paper.
 
First experience of the internet was at home, this would have been early 2000, use too drive my parents mad as the phone was always on the go so they could never use, at one stage we ran up a bill of 500 irish pounds, my dad flipped, he then got onto bt and we were only paying 20 pounds a month after that as long as we didn't use it before 6, as soon as 6 o clock came, all you heard was the modem connecting noise, good times, we couldn't get broadband over here in ireland until 2003 iirc.
 
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