The year was 1999 or 2000, and my parents had a Windows 98 computer, a U.S. Robotics modem, and a Satyam dial-up connection. Satyam came with a small program on CD that made dial-up easy. It had a drop-down list containing four or five numbers. You selected one, clicked Connect, and hoped to hear the familiar modem handshake noise. But more often than not, you would get a busy line.
Sify site from the Wayback Machine, showing some of the programs they bundled: a download resumer and a background page downloader.
Satyam’s subscriber base grew so quickly that those original access numbers became overloaded. Eventually they introduced several new dial-up numbers to ease the congestion, but the problem was that the software never caught up. It still shipped with only the original four or five numbers.
The tech support hack was simple: type one of the new numbers manually.
Now, it was not a big thing, but when I visited my parents during one of the holidays, it bothered me. The software had to have stored the numbers somewhere. Why couldn’t they be edited?
So I started looking for where the numbers could be. Windows 98 had a Registry, but you still looked first for settings inside the program’s installation folder. I started opening each file one by one in that directory.
Most were compiled binaries, the ones that would show you those funny characters in Notepad. But then I found one. Not the obvious candidate, but a file with a weird extension. When you opened it in a text editor, there they were: the dial-up numbers, one per line.
I added the new access numbers, saved the file, restarted the program, and voila, it worked.
The next time I visited my parents, a Satyam engineer happened to come by to look at another issue. He was surprised to see those numbers in the program. He knew the new numbers, and he knew the problem the software had, but he had never seen Satyam’s program with the new numbers already inside it. I showed him how I had done it.
Looking back, I was not really trying to solve the small inconvenience of having to type a number manually. I was trying to understand where the program was getting its numbers from. Anything that did not sit well with my logic, I had to inspect. Anything I could not understand, I had to take apart until it made sense.
Had I not found that little text file, I would probably have opened the executable in a hex editor. Back then, many of us spent hours poking around game files, trying to find where the number of lives or the health value was hidden.