📸

was less line noise and the target computers would be unmanned. The trick, he said later, was to try and stay awake; sometimes he hacked all through the night, and then had to go to work the next morning. His ‘day’ could stretch to thirty-six hours: first eight hours at work, then a night spent hacking, then another eight hours at work trying to stay awake while keeping the printer stuffed with paper and the tape running in the drive. After a marathon stretch like that he would take the next night off and go to bed early.

‘It was obsessive,’ Nick later explained. ‘Five or six hours can seem like five minutes.’ He drank coffee and Coke and ingested caffeine tablets to keep going. ‘When you get into a system you must keep going. It might take four or five hours to penetrate the defences and another four or five hours to protect the position that has been established. If protection isn’t put into place then the earlier work could be wasted.’ The challenge was in beating the system; success came in staying awake. It gave him a feeling of power: he enjoyed knowing that while the designated sysman thought he controlled the computer in fact it was himself, Nick, who had manipulated system-manager status, who was really in control. He was smarter than the sysman, he thought.

Nick liked to compare the whole thing to a game of chess, a battle of wits between him and the sysman. It wasn’t illegal. It was just a game:

The excitement comes from knowing that a computer in the bedroom at home can be used to get into multi-million pound installations. There’s a sense of exploration, of going around the world electronically. The objective is to try to get the highest status within the system, that of system manager. Once there, you start making the rules instead of following them. If the system manager blocks one way in, then you find another. It’s a game with the system manager. The objective of the hacker is to try and persuade a computer that you should have increased privileges.

One person who didn’t see it as a game at all was Bob Jones. Then aged thirty-eight, a tall, well-built man with beard and glasses and an academic uniform that sometimes runs to promotional T-shirts, he was – and still is – the chief programmer at Queen Mary College. He

📸