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reduce charges on calls originating from America. The British telephone network didn't use the same multifrequency tones (it used 2280 cycles). New ways had to be devised to fool the British system, and it was the Captain who had set up the most audacious phreak in England.

The British telephone system was hierarchical, with three tiers: local switching offices, zone exchanges taking in a number of local offices, and group offices linking various zones. Much of the equipment in the local exchanges in those days dated back to the 1920s; in the zone and group offices the electronics had been put in during the 1950s, when Britain introduced national long-distance dialling, or STD (Standard Trunk Dialling) as it was then known. The Captain quickly discovered that users could avoid expensive long-distance charges by routing their calls from the local exchange to one nearby. The mechanism was simple: all a caller needed to do was dial the area code - known in Britain as the STD code - for the nearest out-of-area local exchange, and then add a 9. The 9 would give the caller another dial tone, and he could then dial through to any other number in the country. He would only be charged, however, for the call to the nearby local exchange. The process was known as 'chaining', or sometimes 'bunny hopping'.

With his usual enthusiasm for exploring phone networks, Captain Crunch decided to test the limits of the system. He notified a friend in Edinburgh to wait for his call from London. The Captain then began a long, slow crawl up through local exchanges, dialling from one to the other, through England and then into Scotland. He is reputed to have chained six local exchanges; he could hear the call slowly clicking its way through exchange after exchange (the call was being routed through 1920s equipment, after all) on its snail-like progression from London to Scotland. Thirty minutes later the Captain's call finally rang at his friend's house. The line, it is said, was terrible.

Steve Gold had become an enthusiastic phreaker after he learned the Captain's techniques. But like everyone else around the table in the Chinese restaurant, his interest had turned to hacking as personal computers became generally available. The group was part of the first generation to benefit from the technological revolution that took

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