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to those who work for the appropriate organizations, who have the correct passwords and who are cleared to receive the material available on the network.

For quite obvious reasons, the companies and organizations that control the data on these networks want to restrict access. But there is a counter-argument: the power of information, the idealists say, should be made available to as many as possible, and the revolution wrought by PCs won't be complete until the data and research available on computer networks can be accessed by all.

This argument has become the philosophical justification for hacking - although in practice, hacking usually operates on a much more mundane level. Hacking, like phreaking, is inspired by simple curiosity about what makes the system tick. Hackers are often much more interested in accessing a computer just to see if it can be done than in actually reading the information they might find, just as phreakers became more interested in the phone company than in making free calls. The curiosity which impelled phreakers is the same that fuels hackers; the two groups merged neatly into one high-tech subculture.

Hacking, these days, means the unauthorized access of computers or computer systems. Back in the Sixties it meant writing the best, the fastest and the cleverest computer programs. The original hackers were a bunch of technological wizards at MIT, all considered among the brightest in their field, who worked together writing programs for the new computer systems then being developed. Their habits were eccentric: they often worked all night or for thirty-six hours straight, then disappeared for two days. Dress codes and ordinary standards were overlooked: they were a dishevelled, anarchic bunch. But they were there to push back the frontiers of computing, to explore areas of the new technology that no one had seen before, to test the limits of computer science.

Rather like present-day hackers.

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