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promotion to senior operator but he had turned it down against a vague promise of a job in technical support sometime in the future.

Then nineteen years old, Nick lived with his parents and his Old English sheepdog, Digby, in his parents' home in Enfield in north London. His background is conventional: his father is a sales representative for engineering products and his mother, a diminutive and friendly woman, plays the organ at the local church. He is affable, intelligent and articulate, is generally casually dressed — sweatshirts, jeans, trainers — and has nicotine-stained fingers.

When Nick first started smoking, at school, he was seen by one of his teachers. As punishment he was given lines: he had to write 'I will not smoke in school' one hundred times.

'Can I type it?' Nick asked innocently.

'But that will take longer,' the teacher said.

'Yes, but it will be good for my typing,' Nick answered.

Nick went home and wrote a short program for his PC that copied out the phrase 'I will not smoke in school' one hundred times. It took less than five minutes, then the computer punched out the lines on the printer. The next day the teacher was very impressed by the regularity and consistency of Nick's 'typing'.

Later Nick's life became consumed by his passion for ICLs. He was fascinated by the operating system and by the language used by ICL — called SCL (System Control Language) — to write programs. At times when he thought about his ambition to buy an ICL 3980, he had to admit the whole thing was pretty unrealistic. In the first place, he didn't have £1 million; in the second place, he had no real use for a computer that was designed for large businesses. But then he would begin to worry about what would happen if he lost his job or had to leave the company for some reason. Where would he go to work on an ICL then?

In his bedroom in his parents' house Nick had a personal computer, a Commodore Amiga 1000, equipped with a modem. He had intended to use the modem to dial into electronic bulletin boards — specialist data and information services, like Prestel but generally run by private individuals. It was never his intention to start hacking, he says; he thought it would be boring. None the less, he started to read a guide called The Hacker's Handbook.

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