Please wait...
Did the two of you know each other before you were here? I feel like you both arrived around the same time.
Me and PD or 2 others?
If you mean me, i cant say either way. I dont remember the name from the old days, but even i dont use my old name anymore so its hard to know anyway ( well i do, just not here )
If i wasn't included, then never mind :)
Tue Dec 02 2025 02:26:29 UTC from IGnatius T FoobarDid the two of you know each other before you were here? I feel like you both arrived around the same time.
Denny's was bought out. Closing several hundred stores, and i'm sure major changes to those that remain open. Another 'American staple', gone. :( so sad. Even i can appreciate what it was.
Not been in ~ 30 years. Tho i remember the last time i was, but wont get into it on here of why. But still will be sad to see them go. ( that particular one is gone, it was leveled some 15 years ago and they planted a hotel there. And the borderline hidden houses from the 40's that few knew existed that were nearby, and the trees that helped hide them, also leveled.
We still have 2.5 in this general area. The .5 is buried inside a local truck-stop.
That took me off guard - because on the 916 Citadels - I was called "PD". I suppose that is the natural abbreviation - but still, in the context of the conversation... a little unexpected.
I don't think so. I think we're "of the same time and experience," despite regional differences and distance.
I like Amigas, and Commodores, and turntables and LP records and Atari 8 bits and Citadel because it takes me back to 1982-1989. My teen years.
Nurb seems like an "older" Citadel user to me - but if my friends who were teens were on this Citadel with us - I'd feel like they were still teens, in my mind's eye - they would be the kid I knew in 1987 - not the 55 year old man they are today.
But the common experience - growing up in the 70s and 80s - is just a shared experience - that, if you're observing from outside - might make it seem like we've known each other for decades. No. I met Nurb on Uncensored. He is an Uncensored, East Coast Citadelphian to me.
Tue Dec 02 2025 12:45:25 UTC from Nurb432Me and PD or 2 others?
I had free long distance back in the 80s. So ya.
Sat Dec 06 2025 05:14:05 UTC from ParanoidDelusions
Nurb seems like an "older" Citadel user to me - but if my friends who were teens were on this Citadel with us - I'd feel like they were still teens, in my mind's eye - they would be the kid I knew in 1987 - not the 55 year old man they are today.
But who among our circles didn't? I also had every channel including PPV and the adult channel free. :)
Sat Dec 06 2025 17:56:04 UTC from Nurb432I had free long distance back in the 80s. So ya.
I donno. But i was the only person in the area who had it. My mother worked for Bell.
And of course there was that "free chat line" that few knew about. I forget the number now, and it was really meant for testing connections.. but it worked.
Sun Dec 07 2025 02:28:38 UTC from ParanoidDelusionsBut who among our circles didn't? I also had every channel including PPV and the adult channel free. :)
Sat Dec 06 2025 17:56:04 UTC from Nurb432I had free long distance back in the 80s. So ya.
I had free long distance back in the 80s. So ya.
Back then, having free long distance was table stakes for the nerd club.
And of course having built your own box would make you a far more elite nerd than just letting the computer make the tones for you.
Yes! I was never that elite of an uber-nerd. I had "cool ex-strung out punk with very dangerous friends," nerd cachet, in place of being really smart.
But who among our circles didn't? I also had every channel
including PPV and the adult channel free. :)
Nice. That one was almost too easy, once you understood how analog "scrambling" worked.
They'd just inject extra noise into the pay channels, and back in the 1970's a subscription to a pay channel would actually effect a truck roll to install a "filter" on your line to remove the noise and let the clean signal through.
In the 1980s, the boxes became addressable and would listen for their call to attention from the head end, so they'd know which channels to filter and which to leave the noise intact.
Of course, a typical analog cable box was really just a tunable block downconverter that mapped the selected channel down to the frequency of channel 3 (or 2 or 4, if you were in weirdland), so it didn't take long for a few people to figure out that you can just filter the noise out of channel 3 downstream from the tuner, et voila, every channel comes in cleanly.
Now if you were the kind of nerd who could build a blue box, you were probably also the kind of nerd who would simply open up the Jerrold 450 or other "addressable" converter and find the pin on the chip that activates the descrambler when a paid-for channel is selected, and tie down that pin (I don't quite remember whether it had to be tied high or low ... it was almost 40 years ago). And of course when the cable company wanted the box back for upgrade or replacement, you had to remember to remove the bodge wire first :)
That's when you realize pretty quickly that the "adult" channels on cable (or in hotels, which were just as easy to hack) were really just cheesy softcore R-rated barely-pr0n.
My uncle, made it a hobby to pirate satellite back in the day. He had 2 huge ( 12 feet? i donno, but huge... ) rotatable dish antennas in his back yard, and the stuff to decode it all. He spent far more on his hobby than just buying service.. But hey, don't we all? its a hobby.. they are all money sinks.
For the hell of it, I tried it myself perhaps around 15 years ago ( i forget actual timing, but its been a while ) . Took my old dish-network dish ( the 3 LNA one ), got a 'decoder' box from china where you could enter the monthly codes, found a source.... bla bla. Played with it, even tho i have trees, i got plenty of signal, but nothing of any value. Was a snooze fest. Better off just going on piratebay... Ended up just tossing it and in its place putting one of those broadcast "cone antenna" sort of things, that you can rotate around and has an amp. Mostly was if my cable went out and i wanted to see weather and stuff, since no shows i wanted to 'watch' would have been on. ( still had comcast back then for both TV and internet and ya, losing signal was common )
What made me quit was when they started sending "bullets" that would destroy your box - and then they would sue you for every possible PPV program you could have watched the entire time you had a blackbox. So... every PPV event, all the porn channels, all the subscription services like HBO and Max - but the killer was every VIDEO you could have ordered at $2 a video. That was what added up. And of course the courts would uphold that - so for a couple of years, you would be facing $1.2 million dollar fines - which they would "settle" to $250,000. And that was OK if you would never make that kind of money - blood from a turnip. But with me - I had that much to lose. That is how California law works - the people who have nothing to lose can get away with EVERYTHING, but you fine the people who can afford until they've got nothing left to lose.
But I didn't have to return my box to them. You would get a surplus box, it was hacked - and put THEIR box aside. You give them back THEIR box.
If they could detect a pirate box then it was probably in the digital era, right? Where the box communicated with the head end? I was long gone by that point. I went straight from analog cable to digital satellite, and I had a hacked TiVo but it had a legitimate card in it, so I got what I paid for. As you correctly pointed out, eventually the work of keeping the boxes hacked and the risk of having the pigopolists destroy your life if you got caught started to outweigh the cost of just paying for the service. But it wasn't long after that when we got to the point where the value of the service plummeted to near zero. There's just nothing on worth watching anymore.
Ill second that. Its so rare that anything comes on of value.. Its just not like the old days when you turn on the boobtube and there was something there you wanted to watch.
Sun Dec 28 2025 21:39:19 UTC from IGnatius T FoobarThere's just nothing on worth watching anymore.
I third the motion.
Sun Dec 28 2025 21:39:19 UTC from IGnatius T FoobarThere's just nothing on worth watching anymore.