"Elite" BBS culture in the 1990s

BBS's were divided into two categories: those for "regular" people and those for the "elite."

Getting access to regular BBS's was easy.  You simply needed to get your hands on the
phone number of a regular BBS that in turn hosted a "BBS list", which almost all BBS's
did.  If you didn't have such a phone number then you could usually find a friend that
could give you a BBS list for your area (on a floppy disk!) or at least the phone number
to a BBS with a BBS list.

Example BBS list:

A1 BBS          212-555-4981
John's BBS      212-555-2005
Just For Fun    212-555-1314
Star Trek Fans  212-555-8938
...             ...
And possibly hundreds of other BBS's

However, getting access to "elite" BBS's was something altogether different.

"Elite" BBS's differed from regular BBS's in at least the following ways:

* Generally difficult to find their phone numbers
* Mostly populated by a bunch of high school kids who thought they were "bad ass"
  (if you weren't "elite" then you were a "lamer")
* Almost always required "references" from other "elite" BBS'ers in order to gain access
* Sometimes required a "New User Password", meaning that it wasn't enough to just have
  the phone number; you might also need to know a password in order to "apply" for an account
* Sometimes required you to go through a "New User Voting" process, where you would provide
  references, a list of other "elite" BBS's that you already had access to, answer questions
  like "What is a Beige Box used for?", etc
* Typically had lots of "hacking" text files and pirated software available for download
* Would often have bona fide hackers talking about real hacking exploits in the message forums

How did I become "elite"?  Naturally a fellow high school nerd gave me the phone number to my
first "elite" BBS and got some of our fellow nerd buddies to vouch for me as "references."
It was off to the races from there.

Where did "elite" BBS's eventually take me?  I eventually met 4 or 5 key fellow BBS'ers that
were either already into hacking the local telephone system or at least had a strong interest in it.

One particular BBS'er would eventually become my number one partner in crime for telephone hacking.
I plan to write many other articles just on 1990s telephone hacking, but suffice it to say for now
that this friendship led to an absolute obsession for several years where we did things like:

* Systematic telephone company Central Office dumpster diving almost every single weekend
  (often traveling 50 or more miles in one evening in order to make our rounds)
* Hacking into telephone company administrative computer systems; hacking into telephone company
  switching system computers
* Providing false identification to rent motel rooms from where we could hack with reckless abandon
* Breaking into telephone company vans parked outside of a Central Office in the middle of the night
  in order to steal a bunch of highly coveted telephone company technical manuals (a one time thing
  for me and something that I still feel bad about some 25 years later)
* Meeting the Three Bad Ass Dudes (more about this later)

[Much more on telephone hacking later.]

CREATED 2020-04-14