I developed a serious internet addiction when I was a teenager. My parents were working class and struggling to make ends meet, and I was always dreading the day the phone bill arrived. After a couple of confiscated modems (I had a secret backup box of old 28.8s), I realized I could just trade my web skills for money and pay the bills myself. I guess that's what I've been doing since.
This sounds pretty similar to my experience. Confiscated modems rang a bell! I've also dreaded the day the phone bill came. A friend and me used all kinds of workarounds: Free AOL CDs, Toll Free Dailup numbers where the banking data was not validated in time... got serious trouble (rightly so) for that. Not much later I got a small job and we had 64k ISDN there, later at that time insanely fast DSL 384k. Learned Linux at age 13, Debian 1.3, Redhat 5, I now make a living of that... The addiction is still there, through.
webskills only existed some half decade later or more...
one thing i learned fast was that a 1 line dial in bbs had good attendence, so i started to run mine after some time. was interesting, and damn cheap since nothing beats free
