When I first moved to Atlanta, I was employed by one of the first ISPs in the city. To get an idea, Mindspring, which is now earthlink, the second-largest ISP, started as a customer of this particular ISP. So we’re talking old school ISP.

One of the major benefits of being an old school ISP is that many businesses, in fact, most businesses of any consequence that weren’t giant multinational corporations, were your customer. Most of these businesses had T-1 or T-3 lines, or ISDN service which terminated in our facility. We, in turn, provided Internet access over these lines.

Technical support was somewhat informal in those days. Customers were not afraid to give us intimate details of their network infrastructures, the passwords to their routers (so we could fix problems that they lacked in-house expertise to fix) and we weren’t trained not to ask for such information. I can tell you that in all the times I asked for information such as IP addresses of specific hosts or passwords to routers, I was only questioned one time: by a guy who said “no way.”

I say all of that so that you will understand that we, as the technical support department, knew what each of our customers was running as an Operating System on their mail servers (of course, one can figure that out), what types of routers they used, whether or not they had any firewalls in place, and whether or not any of the individuals we dealt with on a day-to-day basis were assholes or not.

One day, as we were probably doing something nerdy like building Linux boxes or as I was struggling to keep my Macintosh from crashing under the weight of Netscape, one of our main technology guys came out of the “engineering” office and into the technical support area and asked, “who’s running Windows?”

Of course, being geeks, only one or two computers were actually booted into Windows, since any Windows box was automatically converted into a dual-boot Windows-Linux monstrosity. But sure enough, one or two computers were actually booted into Windows.

“What’s your IP?” the engineer requested. Once he had the information (of course he didn’t need to write them down), he turned to leave. “Watch your screens.”

A few moments later, one of the Windows machines took a nose dive. Blue Screen of Death. Memory Dump. The other remained up and running. The engineer returned to the room:

“What happened?”

“That one right there took a shit,” I said, pointing to the now-rebooting computer. The engineer started laughing hysterically.

“Nice, secure operating system you’re running, there!” You’d have thought he was an eight-year-old Super Christian at an Up With People show, he seemed so euphoric.

The engineer, as he swept his bangs out of his face, had demonstrated the ping of death, which was a vulnerability, at the time, of the Windows and a few other Operating Systems. If a malicious (in this case, us) user sent a ping that was bigger than the maximum size of an IP packet, the receiving machine would die instantaneously. It is a trivial thing to do, and, at the time, very few companies had in-house “net aware” administrators handling their systems.

For those who don’t know, a ping is exactly what it sounds like. Just as a submarine commander (“one ping only, Vassily!”) uses sonar to detect the presence of objects, a network administrator can send a packet of data onto a network to determine the presence of othe computers or equipment.

Of course, it doesn’t take long to extrapolate the plot of where this story goes, once we discovered the “ping of death”. If a customer was an asshole, his Exchange server might suddenly die. Sometimes, we’d find out some friend of ours was online, and figure out his dialup IP (yes, we could finger our routers, scary, eh?), get a continuous ping running, and then giggle, as little girls in a tickle fight, at the results as another person would unleash the ping of death:

It’s startling how long it took most people to fix this problem on their networks. What’s even more startling is that we actually did this to our customers and friends, but we were young and the world seemed far less mission critical back before the Big Boom and the Big Bust.