That anti-profit motive is exactly the one I followed as well! Yep I remembered so many of the boxes we uploaded to were wired into a university network in random closets in MIT and other universities.
Yeah we had FXP hosts on most of the east coast universities. Those were the days of just having fun. Ironically it's the knowledge and experiences of being in the scene that quasi got me into working for the government and those letters agencies. I was fortunate that the only real trouble I caused was met with education and support rather than a harsh response. If I was born 5 years later with the slow deployment of ZERO tolerance policies I would have been screwed.
I still give back though, I have a few racked servers that are out there sharing torrents (all legal data), and run a bunch of crawlers for archive.org etc. It's as close as I can get these days to the olden days.
Your HN karma is 1337 right now lol!