I especially enjoyed the story of Sonic's founding
<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/8eccqb/comment/dxu0km6" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/8eccqb/comment/dxu0km...</a><p>Relevant portion pasted below:<p>Regarding the founding, when Scott and I were at the Santa Rosa Junior College, he did a project in 1992 to provide dialup access to students, using this new OS called Linux. Linux had just gotten its first Ethernet interface driver support a week earlier (for the Western Digital 8003EP, a 10BASE2 thinnet card), it was very early, and under really active development - great for a student project. Active SRJC students could get dialup shell access for the semester and use Telnet, email, FTP, IRC, Gopher, etc.<p>Some months later we got a call from another college reporting that “one of your students is being rude on the Internet”, and would we please tell them to stop cussing at people on IRC. (Yes, the Internet was a kinder, gentler place back then.)<p>We looked up the student record and discovered a weakness in our signup scheme: the staff who ran the campus mainframe didn’t trust students like us with much access to records (think: WarGames style grade changes), so we allowed students to sign up with only a birthdate and SSN, and we asked the mainframe if that was a current student via a serial line, which squirted back a 0 or 1 (no or yes) to indicate enrollment status.<p>As things turned out, some student employees in registration had figured this out, and when an older student (Mildred) would sign up for aquatic aerobics at the local JC, the SSN and DOB was being put on a Post-It and sold to a student (Max) at the nearby high school. Max, as it turned out, liked to troll folks in IRC, leading to the discovery.<p>Asking around, we learned that the going rate for a stolen college login was $25, which led to a lightbulb moment: If people were stealing this thing, we could replicate what we’d built at the college and offer it commercially. Thus began Sonoma InterConnect (SON-IC, get it?).