📸

sized system to an old television. That served as his visual display unit, or VDU.

On its own the Commodore didn't do much: it could play games or run short programs, but not a lot more. Even so, the machine fascinated Fry Guy. He began to spend more and more time with it. Every day, after school, he would hurry home to spend the rest of the evening and most of the night learning all there was to know about his new electronic plaything.

He didn't feel that he was missing out on anything. School was a bore, he thought, and whenever he could he skipped classes and spent more time working at his computer. The teachers didn't know what they were doing, anyway: he could work out maths problems in his head, but they always wanted him to write them down. Nor was he interested in hanging around with the other kids. It wasn't that he didn't like them: he had a lot of acquaintances at school, although no real friends. But they were mostly into sports, he wasn't. He was tall and gawky, and at 140 pounds not the right shape to be a sportsman.

He was a loner by nature, he decided.

A year after he got the Commodore Fry Guy realized he could link his computer to a larger world. All he needed was an electronic box and his own phone line. The link would transport him from his home, from the school, from the kids there, from his family.

He upgraded his system by selling off unwanted presents. He bought a bigger Commodore 128 and a colour VDU, plus all the peripherals like the electronic box, and he put a phone line in his room. Eventually he would have three lines: one linked to the computer for data transmission, one for voice and one that could be used for either.

He found out more about the new world of phone links and data transmission when he stumbled across the access number to Atlantic Alliance, an electronic message centre run by computer hackers. From it he got the basic information on hacking; the rest he researched from telecom manuals.

Often he would work on the computer for hours on end, sometimes sitting up all night hunched over the keyboard in his bedroom. His room was a Sixties time warp: Fry Guy favoured psychedelic posters,

4

📸