Richard,

Twenty plus years ago the fun in datatapping was not the display but the RS232 cabling.

Back then terminals at my university computer lab all relied upon DB25 cabling.

When I was a sophmore in college I built my own computer kit and taught myself assembly language and digital circuitry long before the university covered the material.

My university had a computer lab that was always busy 24 hours a day for weeks before the due date of projects. It was insane trying to get on those terminals and I tried coming in many times at 3:00am and waiting and hour for a chance. I decided to find a better way.

I found ways to access terminals reserved for professors scattered around the campus. They were new enough that many didn't really know how to use them. If you could find a technically clueless professor using one, it was easy to get their password. You'd offer to help them, sit down, and say, "Let's start from the beginning." Log them out, log them in with their password and then help them with their problem or debug their program. Later, I could use the terminal to work on my projects. :)

Anytime a professor saw me working on a terminal, they probably assume I was a graduate assistant doing work for a professor. I was never challenged though when I got a questioning look, I'd move to a new location.

To get more accounts I breadboarded a Z80 circuit and put it into a metal box with a DB25 of both sides. I'd plug this inline along the DB25 cable of a terminal I wanted an account upon, and a day or two later I'd flip a switch inside the box and use the terminal to poll the collected signon exchanges (it looked for the key phrases of a signon and saved them to memory). In those days, all terminal equipment looked odd so no one but an expert would wonder about anything connected to it.

By the time of my senior year, it was getting harder to find easy access to the computer. I found out through a fortunate accident that the computer had a couple of 300 baud modems recently added for some project and so I bought a 300 baud modem for $330 and installed it in my computer kit and wrote a program to search for the right phone number inside the university phone number pool.

My final semester project went quite smoothly. While me classmates were exchanging strategies for getting on the terminals in the computer lab, I was able to phone in and upload my edited programs from my place 20 miles away, any time of the day or night. I kept my mouth shut because I had previously shared a discovery about an unused computer lab in the basement of the business school and within three days, the engineering students flooded it until they locked us all out. :)

Those were great times. About four years after graduation, I had a serial datatap packaged inside a bulky DB25 connector and gave the cable assembly to a BBS sysop friend of mine. He considered himself a master hacker constantly boasting about his conquests and I got a kick out of getting all his system passwords and posting them to him. :)

I never told him how I did it. Maybe he'll read this... heheheheheh

aka J