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2
Breaking and Entering

In late autumn in London it becomes dark by 5 p.m. On Finchley Road, a long, wide artery that serves as the evening's traffic jam for drivers leaving the centre of the capital for the northern suburbs, the wind arches through the buildings, driving the mist and a fine drizzle of rain before it.

At the southern end of Finchley Road, near the Swiss Cottage tube station, are rows of undistinguished shops and restaurants. It was in one of these, its red neon sign proclaiming 'Cantonese cuisine', that Britain's premier group of hackers chose to meet on a November night in 1984 for their irregular monthly dinner. The group, which sometimes dignified itself as a 'gang', had a floating membership, but usually numbered about a dozen; its meetings were an excuse to eat and drink, and to exchange hacker lore and gossip.

The members who assembled in the Chinese restaurant comprised a typical cross-section of the British computer underground - a sub-culture which, like much else, had been exported from America to Britain through the natural links between the two English-speaking countries and refined for British use and technology.

Steve Gold, then a trainee accountant with the Regional Health Authority in Sheffield and a part-time computer journalist, was aged twenty-five. As one of the oldest of the group, he had been active when phone phreaking first came to England. Gold liked to tell the story of the emissary from America who had carried the fad across the Atlantic - the ubiquitous Captain Crunch, who in 1970 had been on vacation in Britain for a month.

The Captain had spent part of his holiday touring the GPO telephone exchanges.1 Because the US and British systems were entirely different, MF-ers were of no use in England - except, of course, to

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