Beto O'Rourke's secret membership in America's oldest hacking group -- I like this!

[SWBTATTReg]

8. For those of you who grew up in the 'trade' / IT, back then, response time was pretty bad, ...

and only computers at that time was mainframes (no PCs at that time, one of my subgroups in my office actually studied PCs for the corporation at that time, to see if we could bring them into the company).

In between the slow response times, while waiting, we would all sit there (in the terminal room), sometimes seeing if we could get into other computer systems for the heck of it. We wouldn't do any damage of course, but it was a challenge and it helped pass the time. Also, back then the concept of having everything 'mechanized' was foreign too (mid to late 70s, early 80s), as well as having everything interconnected. It was literally unheard of (everything interconnected) so there wasn't really too much out there Internet-wise.

Now of course, response times are much much better, and breaking/hacking into a system is a NO NO, but back then, the concept of security was all so new and foreign. One of my jobs actually was (within IT) to actually break into a computer system (to test its ability to block unwanted visitors/users), and evaluate its security/make recommendations on improvements.