Techie ran up $40,000 bill trying to download a driver

Welcome to another week in the world of work, and therefore also to another edition of Who, Me? It’s The Register’s Monday reader-contributed column in which you admit to the error of your ways. This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “William,” who like many of you got his first taste of computers from behind the keyboard …

[EvaQ]

OS/2 Warp was less than 40 floppy disks

... so 1000 USD per disk?

Quite expensive service?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: OS/2 Warp was less than 40 floppy disks

I remember when I used to use OS/2 at home commenting on one of the Usenet groups that I was thinking of downloading, I think, the 2.1 beta and I got an email from someone at IBM Hurley Park saying if I posted them the 25 floppies required they'd copy the images and post them back to me to save the download hassle.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: OS/2 Warp was less than 40 floppy disks

Well, I worked at Hursley Park just after they dumped OS/2 and gave everybody a Windows 95 Thinkpad. So there were a lot of disgruntled OS/2 addicts who might still have been willing to offer a free copy service...

It was the same year that Lotus Notes was deemed fit for company-wide deployment. It wasn't.

But they still had a proper pension scheme and the term "Resource Action" had not been invented. Truly, the good old days.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: OS/2 Warp was less than 40 floppy disks

For that money, I would expect to be able to download a car, not a driver...

[Yorick Hunt]

Ah, those good old days...

I ran a BBS in the early '90s and because of its content managed to attract two users from NASA's JPL - who'd log in from work every day because dialling in from home (from the USA to Australia) would've cost them a fortune.

At a blistering 14.4Kbps, mind you!

All went well until they got discovered.

By way of coincidence, my main server ran OS/2 WarpServer, which ran steadfastly without a reboot for more than four years, until the time came to shut the operation down (the internet pretty well killed BBSs).

[C R Mudgeon]

Re: Ah, those good old days...

Re transcontinental logins, I heard a story, back in around 1980 or so, from someone who had previously worked for one of the big mainframe companies of the day. He had been visiting one of their offices in Paris and needed the address of another Paris office. He signed on to the system at his usual office back in the States (presumably over Telenet or Tymnet -- those were commercial X.25 networking providers) -- and emailed(?) a colleague, who, as I recall the story, happened to be online despite the time difference.

It developed that the colleague was at yet a third of their Paris offices. So although they could have had a local phone call if they'd only known to do that, they were communicating via two transatlantic links.

And one of my own -- not between continents, but definitely long-haul: a 3600ish-km copy/paste over ssh, to get some course notes from the computer I had taken them on, onto my then employer's network where I had email, so that I could then email them to the person sitting beside me and watching me do it. (This was 1999, so USB keys weren't a thing yet.)

[Anonymous Coward]

Implausible to say the least.

A local call to your provider in order to receive an email is still only a local call charge.

Back in the 90's you would indeed stay 'on the line' for hours downloading but still only

at a local call cost at most - so the $40,000 charge is somewhat implausible.

Perhaps an AI at work here. ??

[Will Godfrey]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

Didn't get it at local rate in the UK. Also there was a 50:50 chance of actually getting a large file before the connection broke.

[Chloe Cresswell]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

When I first went online via work, we had Compuserv.

"Local" node was 9600 at Lincoln, which was too far (2 STD codes away) to be a "local" call.

London was 14,400. And therefore the same price as calling Lincoln, so we used the London node.

At that time, a local all, in daytime hours, was IIRC 4p/min, and other calls were around 16p/min.

Call it £10 an hour for the call, plus the cost of the Compuserv connect time... It added up fast.

[Roland6]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

Remember the big step forward when ISP’s started offering 1p per minute local connections…

[AlanSh]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

Yes, I used Freeserve - which was 1p/min. I could do a lot for 60p.

Alan

[Wally Dug]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

At one point in the UK, there was an ISP that offered an 0800 freephone connection number. The limitations were that you got cut off after an hour and had to reconnect, it was only between 18:00-00:00 and you had to suffer ads. (I think it was linked to S3, as in S3Jobs etc.?)

Anyway, the way round the ads was to configure your own dial-up connection rather than use their connection software and if you hung up at 11:55 pm, you could (usually) reconnect immediately for another 60 minutes of free dial-up as it only stopped accepting new connections at midnight.

Happy days!

[psxni]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

Xoom, if I remember correctly.

[llaryllama]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

Redhotant had an all you can eat 0800 internet service for a fixed flat fee, they didn't last very long but I got in early enough that it was worth it for a few months unlimited use.

I vividly remember using a chunky laptop with IR port beaming to a Nokia 8810 which made me feel like I was living in a scifi movie. Now I get mad if my gigabit wifi drops out for a few seconds, ah nostalgia.

[MrReynolds2U]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

Even better was free local (evening?) calls via NTL combined with a local dial-in number for our ISP.

NTL may have been Telewest or C&W at the time. It was a long time ago.

[The Oncoming Scorn]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

I used Mercury (IIRC) for a time they had a thing for long distance calls for a max charge of 50p on a Saturday & Claranet had a London number primarily for overseas clients to dial into.

I know I wasn't the only one to exploit that combination as it was mentioned by the tutor heading a MCSE boot camp.

Icon - I'll drink to that, then when I get home post pub Friday night\ Saturday morning hit the dial up.

[Evil Scot]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

CableTel started this IIRC.

£12 ISP + £7 second line. Unlimited internet.

[Jabba]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

Colloquium ISP in Paisley had Cabletel lines. Cabletel to cabletel calls were free 24/7. It was rare that we disconnected!

[BJC]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

I remember that when I started on CompuServe I started with the standard WinCIM software. For that, you needed to be online to read messages and reply. The call costs would add up. I quickly purchased a license for OzWin, allowing me to connect, grab messages from my mailbox and various groups and then disconnect. I'd then review the messages offline and compose replies before briefly going online again with the responses. Way less call time.

Fun times.

[N.B. It was only today, when I was checking the name for the offline application, that I read that it was written in Borland Object Pascal. Perhaps that's how I came across it, because that was my coding tool of choice at that time. All lost in the mists of time, for me.]

[RMclan]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

Another OzWin user here. Even after 30+ years I can still remember my Compuserve account number.

I can remember signing up for the original BT Friends & Family discount scheme back in the 80s where you could register I think it was 9 UK numbers and 1 overseas number to get a discounted rate in the evenings and weekends. I managed to get the Compuserve dial up number registered as one of of my F&F numbers.

[David Hicklin]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

And at one point in the UK calls in the morning were more expensive than the afternoons, so the order was to make any calls in the afternoon whenever possible

[phuzz]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

We had a good workaround when I was at university in the early 00's; Unusually for the UK at that point, we could get phone service from Telewest, instead of being limited to BT. Telewest actually offered free local calls, and the university had a bank of modems and fast connection to JANET. So, all the students could use the university as a free dial-up ISP, just using our university login.

After a while Telewest got wise to this, and announced they would start charging for 'data' calls, even local ones, but fortunately this happened just as they introduced a cable internet service, so for our last year we had a blisteringly fast 512kbps connection!.

Despite knowing nothing about networking, somehow we managed to share the single connection between three of us, simply by clicking different options in the Windows ME 'Network connection sharing' dialogue until it worked.

[ComicalEngineer]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

My librarian girlfriend used to let me log in to JANET (Joint Academic NETwork) periodically when I only had dial-up at home.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

>My librarian girlfriend used to let me log in to JANET

That was very open minded and liberal of her.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

I was working in the US in the early internet commerce days where downloads were made free from local sales tax to help this new technology. Company were I was working were buying in new Synopsys design tools and were FTPing in the install tar files to avoid sales tax ... but they were so big they were constantly getting checksum errors etc so we were waiting for days to get access to the tools. Eventually a Synopsys engineer solved the problem by delivering a tape saying they thought "it would be helpful to provide a ready made backup of the software you've downloaded to save you having to do this yourself"

[C R Mudgeon]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

"a 50:50 chance of actually getting a large file"

There was a time when I was using PGP for that -- not to encrypt, but just using its ASCII armoring as a better uuencode, because it was happy to split a large file into chunks and reassemble them at the other end (after I'd emailed them all to myself) -- and, crucially, to verify the results.

IIRC I did PGP-sign such files, just as a better integrity check than whatever the armoring itself was using.

[david 12]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

It doesn't say where he was dialing from. In the US, local call areas are sometimes quite small. In Aus, downloading OS/2 updates might have meant calling the USA at international rates. I don't know what the situation was in the UK at that time, but large call charges aren't totally implausible.

[Chloe Cresswell]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

In the UK, a local call is normally your area code, and the area codes that touched it.

My local PoPs at the rough time this story appears to date from were 3 area codes away at 9600, or 8 area codes away, also at 9600.

As they were going to be national rate calls anyway, we dialled London, over 200 miles away, at it ran at 14,400, and would cost the same per minute as the closer PoPs.

[Mast1]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

What is this 14,400 you talk of ? Sounds ballistic compared to my first experience of dial-up......

London to Coventry at 300 baud with an acoustic coupler. That was 1979 or 1980.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

That brings back memories of my first "laptop" - a Tandy TRS-80 Model 102. It ran a month on 4 AA cells and had a 300baud modem built in. Basic word processing was also built-in and I used it for drafting visit reports that, if working away, I could back up to a BBS (I had an FDD that could hold local backups - but the BBS option added a belt to my braces, especially if my return home was by air, as I couldn't guarantee the FDD surviving security scanning).

[Chloe Cresswell]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

Quote "My local PoPs at the rough time this story appears to date from"

if you were dealing with OS/2 (first released in 1987) in 1979/1980, then go move your Delorean, it's parked on double yellows...

[John Sager]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

We were doing that at work in the same timeframe - 300 baud thermal printer terminals! We got listings back overnight using DataPost. I never saw the phone bills...

[Paul Cooper]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

Me too - I did Cambridge to London via an acoustic coupler for a few months. CMC Reality (a version of Pick) system at the other end.

[Marty McFly]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

The story is not too far out of line. I think we forget how far we have come in the last 35 years.

A typical 1.44mb floppy took around 1hr 45m to download on a 2400 baud modem. That was a pretty big chunk too. Countless times it would get to 99% and then get a CRC error and restart. It was much safer to grab smaller chunks to increase the probability of getting a clean file and minimize the loss of a restart. I remember only getting a clean download 10-20% of the time with anything that took over an hour to download. Restarts were very common.

Now mix in a little bit of corporate paranoia and unsigned files. It is easy to see a corporate policy that all patches shall only come from the vendor's servers on the vendor's phone number. No concept of signed code until the late 1990's, so only a chain-of-custody could be relied upon for code authenticity.

Back in those days, "Long Distance" calling charged by the minute. To see really high rates, make a call overseas. Even if the vendor provided in-country connectivity, it was pretty well known that the new stuff came from the main office and often took a while to trickle down.

And the vendor-provided the modem pool wasn't regularly updated to the latest & greatest. 2400 baud was top speed in the late 1980's. 9600 & 14.4 came out in the early 1990's, so stumbling across a rack of 'legacy' 2400 baud modems in those years was not uncommon.

Let's play with those numbers a bit.... 1hr 45m for a floppy to download at 2400 baud, 40 floppies for OS/2 = 4200 minutes. Let's say a 20% success rate, that means 21,000 minutes. Call it $2 per minute international calling rates, there is the $40k bill.

Sure, there are a lot of ways this could be done better (like pay to ship the patch in the mail). But the story is very plausible given the tech of the era.

[jake]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

I used to download stuff to my account at Stanford using the fledgling Internet over Switched56, then ride the Bultaco over to the school[0] with a handful of 8" floppies (later QIC tapes) to collect the stuff for home use. Admittedly, the latency sucked, but my bandwidth was far higher than the modem at 1200 ... Later I did the same thing, except the files were downloaded to my server under Bryant Street in Palo Alto via BARRNet at T1 speed and I walked over to collect the data.

_{[0] Using San Francisquito Creek as a shortcut ... A hack that would probably get me hung, drawn and quartered by today's nature nazis.}

[Blazde]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

C'mon 20% success rate? 40 times around? Nobody in their right mind downloads like that. I can believe the end figure though, because corporates were getting shafted back then. The pace of change was so great that what looked like a great deal wasn't 3 months later, and if you took your eye off the ball a little bit longer or signed a long contract a £30k bill is plausible.

There's no doubt he should have done it at home. After 6pm. At least by 1994 line time (the 'sole phone line occupied for the several hours') was the bottleneck for residential dial-up, not the cost.

My own story from a little later in 1999: BT were offering a 0p/min dial-up connection on a special 0800 number for some very reasonable £/month, in the days before 'fair use' restrictions. Snapped it up, connected 24/7, serving websites, amazing unlimited internet like it's the future already. However a configuration error by a flatmate let to the wrong number being dialed, and BT still accepted the login details but chose to charge 1p/min instead (and a little more in peak hours iirc) which resulted in a 500 quid bill at the end of the month, to be shared among students already indebted by several £K each. Despite arguments and pleading that a particular service had been paid for and not delivered in good faith BT refused to waive the bill and I'm pleased to say I've been very diligent in avoiding giving the f***ers even a penny more in the 25 years since. (I've instead given Virgin Media countless thousands for shitty customer service and monopolistic pricing practices, doh).

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

"After 6pm. At least by 1994 line time (the 'sole phone line occupied for the several hours') was the bottleneck for residential dial-up, not the cost."

The bottleneck was how long before a call-waiting bleep cut the connection when a double-glazing salesman called.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

Call waiting back then was a rare and chargeable option that few people, in my experience, bothered with. And even back then, you could dial short-code to turn off in most exchanges. If you did have any of those service that could interrupt a data session, you would but the turn-off codes into the dial-up string with suitable pauses. Something like ATD#43#,,,014357878

(number of commas to increase the pause varied by system)

[LVPC]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

I'm guessing they never heard of kermit, or by the late 80s, telix (xmodem, ymodem, zmodem, sliding download buffers to retransmit bad packets, etc). If you ran a bbs, one of the first uploads you would direct people to was telix. Basically eliminated bad downloads.

[Blazde]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

Yea, there were a lot of good solutions for interrupted downloads however they all relied on the remote sever being capable of starting in the middle of a file. Many weren't and email was probably especially bad. We should also mention it's already not great to do bulk downloads by email because of the then-unavoidable 7-bit encoding.

[J.G.Harston]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

In the '80s I was trying to removely fetch a C compiler, and was getting loads of drops and errors, so eventually did as above, wrote to the chap at the other end and requested a disk. Huge bandwidth, atrocious latency.

[Roland6]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

> wrote to the chap at the other end and requested a disk.

There business back then who’s whole business model was based around burning such disks and shipping for a small fee. Obviously, many lost out to the computer magazine cover disk.

[Roland6]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

> To see really high rates, make a call overseas.

Or use X.25 - in the early 1990’s it was cheaper to fly London-Rio (and back) on Concorde than send 4 1.4MB floppies over X.25.

[theOtherJT]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

I remember one of my dad's colleagues in the early 90s who's entire job was corporate data courier.

Here is a 500MiB hard disk in fancy anti-vibration and anti-static packaging. It goes in this briefcase. Here's your return ticket to New York. Fly this out to the US, someone from the US office will meet you at the airport with another briefcase with the results of last nights calculations on. You trade them today's data for yesterday's results and get straight back on the plane.

Their entire purpose was just to fly back and forth passing hard disks around because there just wasn't any way to move that much data at the time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

I'm sure I've seen that movie. :-)

[Anonymous Custard]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

Sounds like the slightly more glamorous (for the time) version of SneakerNet.

Or to quote Andrew S. Tanenbaum:

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

Upgraded to a jumbo jet of course in this case.

[Not Yb]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

These days we could probably get some really impressive numbers filling a jumbo jet with SSDs.

[dmesg]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

I believe that actually is done today (or at least in the last few years) with some of the highest-end astronomical telescopes. Petabytes+ of data on hard drives shipped from telescope location to data-crunching facility, daily. Facility runs analysis to pick out the interesting data and discards the rest, as there's just too much to store.

[Yes Me]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

Andy learned that at CERN, where "Bicycle on line" and "Jumbo jet on line" were the modes of moving mag tapes around (on site and off site, respectively).

Earlier than that, apparently the local customs post was fine with people driving between the Swiss and French CERN sites transporting used punch cards (ones with holes in them), but balked at unused punch cards, which had commercial value.

[David Hicklin]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

As an apprentice in the late 1970's I was often put on the train to hand deliver tender documents to London (especially the government based ones).

On one occasion I had to fly up to Aberdeen from East Midlands Airport. I had a DC9 from EMA to Glasgow, an HS748 from Glasgow to Aberdeen, taxi to place - drop off docs - taxi back to airport.

Then a 737 down to Heathrow (!) and then another twin engine turboprop back to EMA.

Suffice to say my ears did not appreciate all that up and down but it was a fun day

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

"Countless times it would get to 99% and then get a CRC error and restart."

Was zmodem not available yet? I'm pretty sure I remember resuming failed downloads on 2400baud modems using it..

[C R Mudgeon]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

"Back in those days, "Long Distance" calling charged by the minute. To see really high rates, make a call overseas."

Indeed.

In 1985 I had to make a short phone call from West Germany to Canada, using a pay phone. I was kept so busy feeding a constant stream of Deutchmarks into the slot that I could barely concentrate on the conversation.

[C R Mudgeon]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

"Countless times it would get to 99% and then get a CRC error and restart."

Zmodem ruled! Not only was it windowed, and so got a lot higher throughput than X- and Y-modem [1], but you could resume a failed transfer rather than having to start over.

[1] [XY]modem had to pause transmission after every packet, waiting for an ACK, but Zmodem could pretty much saturate a cleanish line in the direction the file was traveling.

[munnoch]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

I lived in a company apartment in NYC for a year. The internet service was via cable modem but only the downlink, the uplink was over the phone line. Obviously I brought along the server running my DNS and email so the phone line was pretty much permanently pegged up by the server. I believe local calls were free but wasn't there a time limit after which they started charging? I was never asked to pay anything...

When I moved back to the UK, DSL was in its embryonic days fortunately.

[that one in the corner]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

A *local* call to your supplier? What, you think all the dial-up suppliers had a point-of-presence in every STD code within the UK?

Dream on, matey.

Even in Bristol, not exactly the smallest, least-wired place in the UK, we were all signing up for Mercury as the extra account was far outweighed by the savings in call charges as the p-o-p slowly crawled its way from London along the M4 corridor.

[that one in the corner]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

> Perhaps an AI at work here

This is now the clarion call of the "I wasn't there, I don't have the experience to know better, I can't be fagged to look it up - but I know I'm right so I'll be damned if I pose it as a question" brigade.

[Not Yb]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

I don't think you lived in the 90's in the UK... I certainly didn't. Local PoP phone numbers weren't available everywhere in the USA back then, either.

[PRR]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

> A local call to your provider in order to receive an email is still only a local call charge.

Back in the days of CompuServe, CompuServe tried to have a node in every local call zone. (Often a closet in the H&R Block office which tends to be in every town.)

For Reasons, I wanted to archive every file in the library of one of the larger Forums. In the end it fit in half a CD. At 28,000 baud that was not going to happen at home. I never saw a phone bill at work, I assumed local calls and many in-state destinations were free.

It ran about 40 hours. Next month Wendy asked what the heck I was doing on the phone. In an era of commercial $1/minute phone sex, a valid question. I tole her it was computer software (true) for work (ehh) and showed part of the file list. As in the story above, I was asked to not do it again. I offered to pay but apparently I was a minor offender, professors and others were calling worldwide and the phone bill was second only to copier expenses. So my sins were not worth collecting.

[Robert Carnegie]

Re: Implausible to say the least.

I don't know if someone has suggested it, but perhaps "William" and the OS/2 update weren't solely responsible for the comms bill. Maybe someone else at the same time was downloading, what did they call it, warez. Or alternatively, what they call now, nudes.

Or, would a third party e-mail service charge for data storage? Some of them do that now. So watch out for those video presentation attachments.

[Jamesit]

"William used certain tools to concatenate the files sent in this fashion, and then build them into a binary. He’d done this at work, so felt confident he could get the patch he needed for his home PC without attracting undue attention."

UU encode and UU decode? I remember getting files emailed to me that way around 1992, very handy way to get files before the WWW was around.

[Anonymous Coward]

> UU encode and UU decode

For reliable comms across the disc.

[Anonymous Coward]

> UU encode and UU decode

>For reliable comms across the disc.

The last time I used UU encode/decode, I was working in a secure environment and had to copy software updates from a supplier into the environment - and the only option was to zip it, chunk it, UUencode it and email it - decoding at the other end. This worked fine for months - albeit tediously - until one of the updates suddenly started generating swears in the middle of the uuencoding block and the profanity filter intercepted the emails...!

[Christoph]

No, comms across the disc go by clacks.

[Anonymous Custard]

Or broomstick for UU encoded data...

[jake]

There were email-to-FTP gateways and attendant software that handled the drudge work for you.

[Marty McFly]

Got an HR talking to...

Back in the late 1990's, I worked for one company which got bought by another company across the country. Instead of a split tunnel, they backhauled all the traffic to the new corporate office. They had variable speed links that would bring more bandwidth on when required, but was otherwise notoriously slow.

I figured out that "PING -l 65500" to the gateway IP address would send 65k hits to corporate office. Being the curious sort, I launched multiple CMD windows with multiple PING commands just to see where things choked at. Surprisingly speeds didn't choke, they got faster. So I ran CMD windows on a few more PCs and everything went wonderful. Co-workers even remarked how the systems at corporate were more responsive and they were more productive.

Thus it became my daily routine to launch some CMD windows in the morning and shut them down in the evening, making it look like daily work-hours traffic. Until one day I got lazy and left them running overnight.

The next morning I was promptly hauled in front of HR to explain myself and what I was doing to 'hack the system'. I explained what I did and told the HR lady, "If PING is so dangerous, why is the command available on all the computers in the office?" That earned me a 'Don't do it again' warning.

The network team got the message though. They begrudgingly paid for more bandwidth.

In hindsight, I figured out how the system worked and took advantage of it. I guess that is a fundamental component of 'hacking', so maybe the HR lady was right after all? Cheers to edgy problem solving that almost got me fired. Corporate culture is a lot less forgiving these days.

[Lee D]

Re: Got an HR talking to...

My university back in the day had a leased line, while I was struggling along with a 56K modem at home (and they were only 33K upload, remember).

I used to go into university out of hours and at weekends sometimes, download everything I needed, and then bring it home on floppy disks (pkzip span commands are etched into my brain) and later ZIP disks (because the university computers all had ZIP drives for some reason).

This was fine but, increasingly, I was running out of storage and I would have to download things there and then, zip them up and then get them off my account. So I would spend far too much time out of hours trying to download what I needed just to take it home. What I wanted to do was download stuff throughout the week while I was already there, and then take them home the weekend. But...

After a while, a bunch of emails were sent out to students where they said they were monitoring disk usage to save costs (the implication was that there was a direct link between disk usage and people downloading, etc. too). I didn't want to get caught out by that, so I moved everything off my storage as soon as I could. The emails started to come every week and listed the top offenders, who would get spoken to. Then I noticed something. The warning emails were sent at a very particular time and included enough information to determine the time at which the scan had taken place.

So now I knew when NOT to have data sitting on my account. So I was able to ensure that I never had much space being used.

That worked well. But it was then that I got greedy. My elder brother had gone through the same university and had, at one point, been given larger allocations in anticipation of studying there further. But he didn't take it up. He told me his username password and... yes... I was able to FTP into his account. I have no idea why it was still allowed to be active, but it had unlimtied storage. So I added almost unlimited storage (at least, for back in the day) via that. It was still subject to the flagging, but I purged it before the scans took place each time too. But it meant I could spend all week downloading stuff, shoving it through my account and my brother's, and then on the evening/weekend come in and do NOTHING but copy it all and delete it.

I did that for the whole of the 3 years I was there. Was never once flagged. Must have used INORDINATE amounts of their resources for just one person. And I bet they were scratching their head where everything was. Management tools for networks weren't great back then and it would have been difficult to narrow down the networking usage, or analyse the traffic, and without knowing when/where to look, they wouldn't have seen the storage fluctuating, especially shared across two accounts.

Never got caught, and still have a huge binder full of CD-R and DVD-R's that I burned of everything I downloaded.

[C R Mudgeon]

Re: Got an HR talking to...

"Thus it became my daily routine to launch some CMD windows in the morning and shut them down in the evening,"

At one job, I had to ssh from my company laptop into one Linux host, and from there into another one where I was actually doing my work. The problem was, at least one of those connections had a stupidly short timeout, so I was constantly losing my connections.

I took to doing as you did, running a "ping -i 60" or whatever, as a home-brew keep alive.

[Korev]

Regomiser

William should have been Regomised to Bill for this one

[Ken Shabby]

Re: Regomiser

Bill Stickers will be prosecuted

[Blue Shirt Guy]

Re: Regomiser

Bill Stickers is innocent.

[Oh Matron!]

Re: Regomiser

Bill Posters was framed.

[The Oncoming Scorn]

Re: Regomiser

Bill Posters was fitted up.

[PRR]

Re: Regomiser

> Bill Posters was fitted up.

Post no bills.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Regomiser

Someone tell the utility companies :-)

[Korev]

I used to work somewhere with an office on the border between France and Switzerland. iphones had just started to be given to people, but roaming charges were still insane. Apparently the phones belonging to people in one building with poor mobile reception flipped to the other country's network and then ran up huge phone bills.

It didn't take long for the order to go out telling people to disable roaming...

[SVD_NL]

Oh I remember many similar situations. Coverage for border areas was usually poor, making the problem worse.

Switzerland is a fun one too! IIRC they were quite expensive compared to some other EU countries, and it took a while for them to be included in the EU zone for roaming purposes. (As a side note, Switzerland is the main reason i know about all of the different European treaties and zones, because I need to check if rules apply to Switzerland before i travel there!)

[MJB7]

Switzerland _was_ quite expensive?

I live in Germany near the Swiss border. Roaming in Switzerland is still quite expensive (for calls). I pay €1.49 per minute for outgoing calls to Germany and €0,69 for incoming calls. Data is included on my contract though. Fortunately I mostly use Signal/WhatsApp when I talk to people.

Handily my mobile provider still thinks the UK is part of the EU, so I get free calls, and more data than I can use when I go back.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Switzerland _was_ quite expensive?

" I pay €1.49 per minute for outgoing calls to Germany and €0,69 for incoming calls."

Wait...what? The service provider gets paid by both ends of the call? Does that include same network calls too? So you get charged for incoming unsolicited spam calls too?

[The Organ Grinder's Monkey]

Re: Switzerland _was_ quite expensive?

I'm sure that getting charged for both incoming & outgoing calls was the norm in early roaming days in Europe? I can't now remember whether my first roaming experiences were with an analogue Motorola 8500x or a first-gen digital one, which will have been a Nokia 2110.

Also, wasn't that the norm in the US? I'm in the UK but we have relatives in Minnesota & I'm sure that I remember being horrified at the arcane billing schemes used by their mobile networks which definitely included getting charged for receiving calls, possibly only if they were cross-state or cross network or something like that?

The chap that I was working for when I got my first 8500x, his father ran the UK arm of a big German machine tool company, & had what, at the time, seemed to be the last word in modern mobiles. I've just tried googling to see if I can work out what it was but no luck. When we all had 5800 or 8500s or Panasonic C series (ETACS!) 'phones, his was the shape & size of a thickish paperback book. I'm sure that his contract charged him for incoming calls regardless of where he was, & came with an eye watering exit fee, the price of being an early adopter. Don't remember those 'phones ever being in the normal retailers, they were sold exclusively through advertisements in things like the FT.

[K555]

There have been some recent instances of people on the Norfolk coast having their mobiles roam to Maritime networks at a potential cost of cabillion pounds a minute.

[GlenP]

With the demise of free EU roaming on many UK mobile networks you have to be careful on the south coast. We were at Dover Castle a while back and my brother had to make an urgent call. No problem, until he got the French equivalent of, "This number has not been recognised!"

[Anonymous Coward]

My wife & I were travelling a few years ago, and it was definitely non-intuitive where 'free roaming' with a UK contract still applied. Although we both had free EU roaming, one of us could also roam for free in the Channel Islands, but not in Gibraltar (neither is in the EU), but the other (on a different MVNO) had the reverse. IIRC Switzerland was also one of the places where different rules applied. We had to be very careful which phone we used where. Recently in the Azores and Madeira we could both roam for free because they still counted as EU (Portugal) despite being closer to Africa than European mainland, there's no logic to it.

[John Brown (no body)]

"Recently in the Azores and Madeira we could both roam for free because they still counted as EU (Portugal) despite being closer to Africa than European mainland, there's no logic to it."

Interesting. IIRC, French Guiana (and a few others) is a département of France, so I wonder if that counts as "EU" and includes EU wide roaming?

[dinsdale54]

I've had that at the Square & Compass pub in Dorset - no UK mobile signal obviously, being rural but I did get a French one.

[Mast1]

French mobile signals in Dorset

Well, historically, Dorset was a good place for doing irregular cross-channel trade with eg France and Holland. Who would want to be doing business on a UK cell with Customs & Excise snooping around ?

(Ref Moonfleet by J. Meade Falkner, 1858-1932)

[The Organ Grinder's Monkey]

Ref "careful on the south coast," yes, very much still a problem. I spend quite a lot of time in Dover & Folkestone & routinely get the "welcome to France" text message, several times per day sometimes if I move around the town a lot. The network billing people are entirely used to calls saying "I've been billed for a French call / mms / data roaming & I was in Dover" & refund such things without quibbling (in my experience on Orange / EE, ymmv as always.)

[Sparkypatrick]

Those people affected on Three, by any chance. Had this issue with them on a ferry. Roaming on, as my contract included UK and France. No idea the maritime network existed, let alone that my phone would connect to it.

That time wasn't a big deal - a couple of quid and they refunded it. The next time, I was in Alaska on a cruise. The US was also in my plan, so roaming was on and my phone obviously decided to start syncing back my photos from the trip. Didn't turn it off when back on board and at some point in the night, it dropped the US signal (boat wasn't moving) and switched to maritime. Despite a £10 spend limit set, ran up a £400 bill. They dropped it to £200, but you can bet I am no longer a Three customer!

[NXM]

near squeak

I almost got hit with this when I was staying in Broadstairs and could only get an intermittent signal from France. I turned roaming off pronto!

(For those who don't know, Broadstairs is on the South Coast of England down a steep hill and the UK mobile service there basically didn't exist at the time)

[dinsdale54]

A friend once worked for the national telecom company in a small country in Europe. He informed me that they were a bunch of crooks after they deliberately built mobile 'phone masts along the border near the autoroute so that they could generate roaming charges from everybody driving past their little country.

[PB90210]

I remember reading about a research project somewhere in Africa(?) that tracked the range of a bird by fitting it with a tracker that periodically texted its location.

Unfortunately it decided to take a holiday from its expected range, crossed a border and ate up the entire budget for the project in roaming charges.

[John Brown (no body)]

You mean this one, cover by El Reg?

[The Organ Grinder's Monkey]

In the comments under the El Reg bird migration story from 2019 linked to by JB(nb) above, there's a surprising number of commenters shouting down their "doom-monger" pessimistic co-commenters for suggesting that the forthcoming completion of Brexit would result in UK mobile operators immediately ramping up their EU roaming fees back to their pre-EU directive levels...

Sweet summer children roaming free in the ElReg commenting community.

[big_D]

Not me...

I worked for a large company that made traffic light systems in the UK. We had a bunch of operators on shift and a fleet of VAX minis. We also had a modem pool.

One operator loved playing MUD on the Essex Uni system... He'd dial in from home for short sessions. He sometimes played "on the clock" when he was doing a nightshift. One day, he decided to do a raid, but there wasn't anyone else around to help, so he set up a bunch of terminals to run as the "team" and spent the night going through MUD dungeon... Only it was sticky mud.

The phone bill came in at the end of the month and his little dungeon raid had cost the company couple of grand! Luckily for him, his mate ran the internal billing system and was checking the Telecom invoice. He admitted what he had done and got a slap on the wrist from his mate and, on the promise never to do that again, the bill was spread evenly across all the projects that used the dial-up modems... A lucky escape.

Icon: Whatever you do, there is always someone watching you!

[big_D]

Re: Not me...

The same operator once caught me away from my terminal. Policy was to log off when you left your desk, I was just running around the corner and in the middle of a big edit, so I left the terminal logged on.

When I came back, he had made some white space in the middle of the file and prominent in the middle of the screen was the sentence "write out 1,000 times, I will log off my terminal, when I leave my desk!"

So, I opened a new file, wrote the sentence and copy and pasted it 1,000 times into the file (macro). I then exited the file and started the VAX Phone utility (a forerunner for ICQ and everything that came after it). The operator answered and I piped the file to his terminal! :-D

I once met a senior manager who was on the receiving end of something similar. A secretary at one of his customers was working on an email to send to the SM, she left her desk to carry out some task quickly, came back and sent the email... Only, while she was away, some joker had written some inappropriate text in the middle of the email, along the lines of a nice rear and wanting some hands on experience with it... The poor woman was mortified, when she found out, but, luckily the senior manager at the supplier thought it was absolutely hilarious and was laughing and telling everyone about the email he had received, so there was no damage done to the relationship between the two companies. I don't know hwat happened to the idiot that typed the message...

But another time, I was working late, along with a couple of other people, when the site manager came in and ordered everybody to leave. I told him I had a deadline, he said, no problem, he'd talk to the customer, leave NOW!

I found out later that a colleague had gone up to the his PA, opened his trousers and plonked the contents on her desk and asked her, what she could do with that... She said she needed a second opnion and called her manager... That was why we were asked to leave, he was marched in, once we had left, to clear out his desk, never to be seen again. I have no idea how he explained his sudden lack of a job and, probably, impending prosecution, to his fiancé once he got home. Again, not me, but that was a very expensive mistake for the colleague, and I would assume devastating the fiancé and traumatic for the PA.

[LordZot]

Re: Not me...

Quite the devastating second opinion, and rightly so!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Not me...

I'm assuming he didn't sue for unfair dismissal as he knew it would never stand up in court.

[Anonymous Custard]

Re: Not me...

An alternative suitable response could be "let me go and ask my boss to borrow his magnifying glass"...

[Sean o' bhaile na gleann]

Re: Not me...

Ah, yes - the classic response from actress Mae West in a somewhat similar situation...

"It looks like a penis, only smaller".

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Not me...

Ah... MUDs. We had a Gandalf PACX with both an inbound and outbound modem, so not only could you play MUDs on the clock but you could play them from home on only a local rate by proxying through the Gandalf. It was found out of course and I suspect that the datacomms manager knew that it was me.. but he was also the Union shop steward and nothing was said.

[big_D]

Re: Not me...

Ah, Gandalfs, now that brings back memories.

"I was there Gandalf, I was there 3,000 years ago." OK, I'm exagerating, it was only about 35 years ago. :-D

[Roland6]

Re: Not me...

> I worked for a large company that made traffic light systems in the UK.

Based in Borehamwood or the one based in Christchurch?

[big_D]

Re: Not me...

Christchurch / Poole

[The Oncoming Scorn]

Re: Not me...

"Icon: Whatever you do, there is always someone watching you!"

That's very true, we have a new manager here he's doing a 500KM commute daily (He's going to be renting my basement, until he makes a permanent move).

He got a letter charging him of insurance fraud, penalties include revocation of Insurance, massive fine & punishable by up to 11 years in clink & other nasty stuff as his daily commute mileage is greater than his expected amount which he had stated when he took out his policy.

How did he get caught?

He took his vehicle in for a oil change, the mileage got uploaded to a database & detected by the insurance system (Don't ask me how that trust relationship works unless it was some form of dealer\insurance company preferential rate).

[Not Yb]

Re: Not me...

That sounds like one of those letters that would be easily dealt with by saying, "I'm sorry, I got a new job and forgot to update my insurance mileage. What's the difference in premiums, and how do I pay it?"

[big_D]

Re: Not me...

I was doing something similar in the UK, around 70,000 miles a year business, with my private car. The company offered a leasing offer for employees, starting at 99UKP a month, I phoned up for a quote, they couldn't give me one on the phone. They got back to me, for a 15,000UKP car (mid-range at the time, end of the 90s), they wanted 3,500UKP a month for the lease! Luckily, at the time, they didn't want to know mileage when taking out insurance.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Not me...

It's not changed much. I've not looked at the actual numbers in detail, but our company partned with Octopus on EV leasing. They only quoted prices up to about 15,000 miles per year, (which was getting quite expensive at even that "high" mileage. Some of us were frequently driving 60,000+ and not one of us bothered to contact them for a quote on that mileage since it was clear it would be very unaffordable! Leasing can be very, very expensive and they get you all ways because they want a car back at the end of the period in "perfect" condition with low mileage (high penalties for scratches and over mileage) they can then sell on, despite the lease payments covering more than paying for the full value of the car plus depreciation.

[big_D]

Re: Not me...

When I qualified for a company car, back in '98, I looked for a car and applied to the fleet management, they asked how many miles I drive (standard for the company cars was 60,000 over 3 years). I told them I do around 60,000 business miles, with another 15-20,000 private (and around another 20,000 on my motorbike - I did a Euro tour each summer, which was around 12-14,000 over a week and a half or so on the bike). They said that I couldn't do that, that was too many miles, I pointed out that I had been doing that for the last 15 years, a majority of it in my private vehicle, so, yes, I can do that!

I have no idea how much it cost them, but they did finally get the car for me.

[Richard Gray 1]

Groupwise

Not me but a user in the company I worked for.

Groupwise while an ok email and calendar, had a flaw. Async upload and download, with queues that wouldn't clear without manual intervention, so if you had a download and it failed there was a reasonable chance that it wouldn't just reconnect, but would want to create / upload & download everything again.

Of course this was before widespread internet gateways so the user would have to dial into the office to connect to the Groupwise gateway.

So this user had someone email him some ISOs

That he then tried to download several times

From his HOTEL phone in (I believe) South America, while dialling the US Gateway

And it kept on failing (I wonder why) so he kept on trying, each time the requested download getting larger and larger. I can't remember the outcome, but the fact we all heard about it meant it must have been a significant cost.

On a slightly different note, we had a phone number that got forwarded to a SatPhone for the PMs to contact the Rigs from home / normal mobile (even that was expensive back then).

there was suddenly a huge spike in costs. It turns some Ned had a hacked sky box that was calling a random local number (ours)

[Lazlo Woodbine]

Back in the dim and distant late 90's I worked for a large retailer.

Whilst our main business was computerised, with tills and stock ordering connected to Head Office on an ISDN line, the main operation of the store was still paper based, with fax machines used to communicate between branches.

That is until one day, when we were notified, by fax obviously, of the imminent arrival of "Workbench", a computer system that would provide online procurement for store consumables, online staff recruitment via a link to Job Centres, MS Office (97 I think we got) and email.

Our store manager at the time was something of a luddite, and had never used any kind of computer, so would need dragging into the computer age. To this end I found an old PC, loaded it with Windows and MS Office, then proceeded to teach him basic computing, right down to how to operate a mouse and keyboard.

Three months later, after the successful introduction of our "Workbench", which turned out to be a Wyse terminal linked to the Head Office mainframe, that manager left, presumable to join a company that didn't use computers.

As I was tidying his paperwork and getting the office ready for our new manager, I found the phone bill for the spare line I'd used to connect the PC to the internet, it was well over £2,500.

I'd set up the PC with a free ISP, so the calls were to an 0845 number at about 4p a minute. I think he'd been on the internet the whole working week for about a month.

I'd scrapped the PC after the Wyse terminal was installed, I dread t think what was on the hard drive...

[Wally Dug]

Forwarding Calls

In my office, it was a user who realised that she could forward her desk phone to an international number and, by dialling her desk phone from home, it was redirected abroad and while she was charged at local rate, the company was charged the international rate.

As big_D says, "Whatever you do, there is always someone watching you!" So, yes, she was quickly caught, international dialling was restricted to all but certain extensions and we were all given a talking to. (Unsure what exactly happened to her, but she kept her job.)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Forwarding Calls

Unsure what exactly happened to her, but she kept her job.

This was fairly common for a while at a certain University whose financial management and policy framework were largely figments of an addled imagination.

Well over six months before the proverbial dropped and only after a gobal corpoarate had suffered from the same complaint.

No one got more than a mild reprimand as there was absolutely no policy on acceptable ICT usage or much else for that matter.

Seven years later and only after workplace legislative changes was a policy banning NSFW content from University hardware and networks added.

[Roland6]

Re: Forwarding Calls

Funny how in the 1990’s we were deliberately using the company’s private lease line network to make international calls; you just needed to remember to dial the relevant switchboard before you asked for an outside line…

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Forwarding Calls

user who realised that she could forward her desk phone to an international number and, by dialling her desk phone from home, it was redirected abroad and while she was charged at local rate, the company was charged the international rate.

We could do the same, but fortunately we made so many calls to the US that we had a dedicated network link from our local European office to one of our US sites, and phone calls from the PABX were routed over that, only appearing on the US public network closer to the destination, whichg kept call costs well down. I could divert my desk phone to another US number & then call it from home, very useful to, ermmm, chat with my California-based girlfriend...

[IanTP]

Happy Days

Remembering my first PC after my Amiga, it was a 486 SX/33 which I upgraded to a 486 DX4/100, the modem was a 28.8 baud and my first ISP was Compuserve from a magazine CD, the PC came installed with WFW 3.11, a friend had a copy of Win 95 on floppy which was quickly installed.

Happy days indeed.

Mines the one with the Win 95 floppies in the pocket -->

[GlenP]

ISDN

Back before VPNs became viable and when most internet access was dial up the corporate I worked for dictated that we had to provide access to our AS/400 for an office in the Netherlands (and of course with no budget). I did warn them that the only viable method at the time was via ISDN between the sites which would be charged at international call rates.

Due to the nature of the connection we'd had to set quite a long keep alive time, after the first month or two, and substantial phone bills, it was decided they'd do all the paperwork in one go each morning! It was still cheaper than an international leased line would have been but the Dutch operation really wasn't large enough to justify the effort and cost.

[Chloe Cresswell]

Re: ISDN

We had a client with the head office in Belgium, and a UK office.

Their IT guy decided the best way to transfer data was an ISDN router and it to call the head office.

Regardless of international call rates, the 5p BT minimum call charge, coupled with minimum connection timer being set very low, and how fast ISDN2e can setup/tear down a circuit meant the first bill was... eyewatering. The bill made a thud as it landed, documenting all these few second calls, thousands a day...

[Chloe Cresswell]

We built a client some PCs to take over layout/production for his printing firm.

Running NT 3.51 then NT4. The NT4 machines had Diamond Viper video cards (Weitek P9100 based)

We found a flaw in it, where art work being dragged in Corel Draw would overwrite the tool bars.

Diamond told us there's a fix. It's the latest driver.

Which was only available on their BBS.

We're in the UK. BBS was in California.

The BBS didn't support Z-modem. It only just supported X-Modem1K.

4,800 was the fastest I could get the link to go (14,400 modem on this end) over the transatlantic links.

It dropped multiple times.

The driver fitted onto 1 1.44Mb floppy.

The call costs were over £85.

[big_D]

International relations...

Not monetarily expensive...

I worked for a company that printed money (literally). Governments would get them to design and print their currency, if they didn't have their own mint. They also had a side-line in ID cards and elections.

They were hired to run the elections in for an African country that was having problems with rebels at the time, luckily I didn't have a passport, so I was stuck in head office providing support.

We used Lotus cc:Mail and dial-in modems. Everything was working fine, until the team set-up shop and tried to contact the mail server. They kept complaining that it wasn't working. In the end, I plugged a phone into one of the modems and got them to call in and listened on the line. In the middle of the modem handshake there was a loud click in the line and both modems dropped the connection. The government was attempting to tap the line, but their equipment was so old, it made an audible click on the line as it kicked in. The team had to formally request that the line not be tapped and that it was only used for computer connections, which they couldn't listen in on anyway.

[Luiz Abdala]

I totally relate to that.

Back in the day, I had to make long distance calls to get internet, and left my whole paycheck of 15 days with the phone company.

The first ISP that offered long-range Wi-Fi with UHF antennas and literal springles' can would cost me another paycheck, but it was worth it, never again I had a phone bill like that.

(TLDR, that ISP was tinkering with WiFi range, and we managed 3 miles with 256 kbps in 802.11b, worth it.)

[raidfire]

Half a million pounds for not keeping an eye on the Job

So let me set the scene, late 90's we worked for Marconi Telecoms on the British Telecom ADSL rollout contract, we were making stupid money for a stupid client comissioning the adsl racks in phone exchanges, every install had to be audited by the network operations unit before it was signed off, pull a cable does ops see a red light somewhere that kind of thing, the audit queue was 3 days long and we got 38 pounds an hour waiting time to sit in a hotel on call for the audit, we got allowances in cash for the hotels and substinance while we were on the job so what do you do in the boredom - spend the money on beer stay up all night and get a couple of hours in the back of your van, splash your face in a service station and get a british telecom breakfast down you (outstanding far better than its network offering). Absolutly ****ed still from the night before, mind and conversation both on the woman from last night one guy is installing an adsl mux into a rack, these things have a back board with many tens of thousands of pins, each unit carries a quarter of a million adsl connections at a cost of half a million pounds, they had something similar to train tracks on the side which needed perfectly aligning with with rack rails then there was a crank handle on the front and the unit is supposed to glide graciously so pins meet backboard, skipping protocol the guy installed it alone when the docs said 1 man per rail, the handle diddn't want to be gracious so the great oaf gave it a proper yank, unit went bang, back of the rack was scattered in pieces around the hall, half of it embedded in the door of the rack behind it, in the process part of it hit the open 400V rails above taking out the breaker for entire row of racks including live switching gear. Macclesfield uk circa '99, guy got fired and we got a new company credit card and alcohol policy.

[Ikoth]

Blue Beep...

...was the answer. IYKYK

[ColinPa]

Dont hone home

I remember the days before WIFI when you had to connect your laptop to the phone cable. We had an AT&T dialer so we could phone a local number to get back to base.

It was someone's first trip abroad, to present a conference in a big hotel in the US.

Half an hour before his session he phoned home, got the demo working ... did his presentation working and did his demo. Round of applause - hurrah

His phone bill was bigger than than his travel. He had not used the dialer - so was charged at International rates for 90 minutes, with a hotel marlup of + 50 %

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Dont hone home

"I remember the days before WIFI when you had to connect your laptop to the phone cable. We had an AT&T dialer so we could phone a local number to get back to base."

Many of us here remember the days before laptops, and possibly even before any form of dial-up, although I couldn't possibly comment on the latter :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

Not comms related, but in a similar vein

What’s the most expensive mistake you’ve made without consequences?

At Uni in the late 70s I'd been reading a copy of Practical Computing where they had a feature on gaming, including a description of Crowther's "Adventure" (see http://8bitag.com/info/adventureii.htm. I wrote to the mag with some info on the systems I had access to, and asking if anyone knew where I could get a copy of Adventure. I got a telling-off from the boss of the computer centre for discussing the University's computer resources in public, but I also got a reply from Jack Pike offering me paper tape copy of Adventure if I paid postage.

I happily did so, and loaded the resulting tapes onto my student account, soon discovering that it was too big to run (needed 40Kwords memory to run, when I was limited to 25K). Some rewriting to shift data to an indexed file allowed me to get it running, and my friends in the engineering department (the only people I'd told) were soon hooked. A month or so later I was in the canteen when I overheard a conversation from some folks that I recognised as CompSci undergrads from another building: "Have you found the volcano?" - "What, there's a volcano?!". Obviously someone else had found the game.

That's when I got a summons from the computer centre director, who dropped a 2" pile of fanfold in front of me and asked if I recognised it. I did, it was my Adventure source file... I owned up, wondering what was coming next, but was astonished by his next question: "Can you tell me why 90% of billable computer time last month was people running this single program?". Ooops.

I was pleasantly surprised when he said that he had no fundamental problem with people running it in their spare time, but told me that I had to restrict it to a limited group of people and off-peak hours only, otherwise he would have all copies deleted. Not sure the response would be so lenient today.

I still have the paper tape...

[ricardian]

BT was set toll out fibre in 1990 but the PM at the time put a stop to it

https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost-the-broadband-race-in-1990-1224784

[Dave314159ggggdffsdds]

TBF, it was the correct decision without the benefit of hindsight, and even with hindsight is arguably correct given how much of the tech (and even fibre itself) available at the time would have had to be replaced since.

Not doing a proper roll-out earlier than we did, but a decade or two after your example, is a whole different failure

[Apocalypso - a cheery end to the world]

That story doesn't add up. It claims Thatcher wanted more competition so blocked the roll out to give competitors with older technology a chance.

However, at that time BT was already privatised so could have told her to bog off and gone ahead anyway.

Presumably - the unstated bit of the story - is that they wanted a large Government subsidy to do the roll out and that was the bit she declined to provide.

[Anonymous Coward]

I once managed to configure an ISDN router so that the secondary link kept coming up, then immediately dropped. Then came up again. This was when there was a minimum 5p charge for a call. Nobody noticed until the rather large bill arrived.

The itemized bill had to be delivered by a courier.

[Robert Carnegie]

Oh dear, this is starting to feel familiar.

[Vestas]

This article is complete bollox

The largest fixpack for OS/2 (any version) was just over 35MB.

No way do you run up a $40k bill over 35MB, not even in the early 1990s in the UK. $400 maybe.

Total bollox.....

[spireite]

OS / 2

Would that be Oh s**t, but a lot more than twice?

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: OS / 2

No, it's half an "Oh Shit".

[spireite]

Re: OS / 2

Half?

Not a turd?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hold my beer...

My organization used Sierra Wireless Raven X cell data modems back in the day; they were often configured and deployed by persons with primary skills other than IT and security and they poo-pooed anything outside their own discipline, i.e: IT, network security, etc. Of course they left the default passwords on the hardware with no IP filtering. Why on earth would you want inconveniences such as needing to document things and accessing equipment only from the organizational network or worse... VPN? The devices were used for what I will call SCADA (they hate that, how could anyone have a recognized function outside their own?) with relatively low traffic volume, so they opted for miniscule data plans with overage charges per megabyte in the range of silver colored US coins. Things add up when you have full 3G speeds available and utilized such as when devices are hacked (Can you call it hacking if it's got a default login?) I was only granted a picture of the bill for one of these modems that was leveraged by miscreants. The bill was in the top ten breathtaking bills or quotes I have seen in 30 years of IT/telecom and adjacent work. Over six hundred thousand US dollars of overage charges for one data plan for one month.

[Grunchy]

I did something similar

Back in 1993 we got a "Cubital" rapid prototyping machine, at the Alberta Research Council, which cost over $1 million and was approximately the size of a Buick (think of a Buick that got compressed in a wrecker), and which came all the way from Israel. I was an intern in the "mantech" manufacturing technologies group which acquired this beast, so I was tasked with marketing this thing all across North America. Being a BBS guy, and this being pre-internet era, my idea was to get a Fax Modem on the PC and hit all the aerospace manufacturers, defense, automotive, and anybody else I could think of. NASA, etc. So I created a dialing list of about 500 fax phone numbers and prepared this page on Aldus Pagemaker on the Mac describing this new rapid prototype, "additive manufacturing" technology that we got up in Alberta, and hit "send". Of course, long distance is cheaper overnight so that's when the autodialer went off. Well, a couple weeks later we got the phone bill, and my boss was surprised how much repeatedly failing fax transmissions could rack up that quickly. I forget the exact number, but it was a couple thousand at least. Anyway so much for that.

(So anyway, this technology morphed from "rapid prototyping" to "3d printing" which is practically ubiquitous today. Being a government initiative it wasn't meant to be a "profitable" venture, or to compete with the private sector, but let's say the technology matured very very rapidly and the Cubital machine became obsolete very quickly, and kinda worthless very quickly. But it made very, very, very good parts, and you take guys like GM and NASA and they generally have their own $1 million budget if they thought it was important enough. I left to go finish my degree, Mantech got dissolved, my boss was summarily fired, and even ARC got recycled into Alberta Innovates today. Fun time! The only other time I heard of ridiculous phone bills was my buddy running a Fido Net node, again pre-internet, which would ferry email between cities. I think his monthly long distance bill was like $80 or something which supposedly would be paid by the Fido Net enthusiasts, I never heard how well that worked.)

[J.G.Harston]

Or even YModem, which is basically XModem with out-of-sequence packet transfering and filename/metadata blocks. Wrote a pretty decent 6502 YModem suite in the 1990s.

[IanMayo]

Most expensive copy of WinZip ever

A long time ago I supported the trial of some software that was to be used on a very large black underwater vehicle.

A catastrophic disk failure (damaged during transit) meant I had to rebuild the solution over the weekend. No problem - I had a backup with me.

Could I find a copy of WinZip, to unzip the backup anywhere? Hell no.

So, on a Saturday evening I trawled the local petrol stations looking for a copy of "Computer Pro", "Computer Weekly", anything that had a floppy disk of sample software attached to the front. This was the time of transition to CD, and cover floppies were increasingly rare.

Eventually, I was forced to give up. Another system to be trialled on the "vehicle" was use of an Inmarsat receiver (the size/shape of a briefcase). From my accommodation I was able to dangle the antenna (briefcase lid) out of the window, and connect to the internet. Then I was able to start downloading winzip. But, since my location was in the depths of a valley, the signal was seriously flaky. So, it took hours and hours of retries. I finally heard a "ping" of success, and was able to restore the system, ready for the trial. This copy of WinZip cost around £1000 in Inmarsat fees - surely the most expensive copy ever...