I didn't do any cracking, but I was a teenager in the late 90s and I share your thoughts on the way that computers and the internet eventually opened up my experience. I ended up making friends with any internet café owner in my city because that was the only reasonable place to use the internet before broadband.
Happy to share! I ended up working for an ISP at 16 so I could have T1 access and free ISDN at home. I was lucky the scene provided motivation to teach myself Linux and sysadmin stuff, which is where my career ended up going at the time.
Thanks for sharing!