Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace by Michele Slatalla

barber to preserve the precise geometric layering.
    His jeans look like they're just about John Candy's size, so they're beyond baggy on Mark, cinched with a thick belt and pooling over his shoes. His shirt is clean and pressed, his pants are clean and rumpled, his hair is clean and shiny. He gives off a good smell as he gets into the car, a fresh, soapy fragrance that fills a space and makes a car owner self-conscious about all the crumbs on the floor and all the dust motes on the dashboard.
    Eli says Paul is hanging out at the Continental, the outdoor strip of stores at 71st Avenue and Continental Boulevard, so they drive over there and pick him up. And now, of course, the evening's main activities can commence.
    You might call it hanging out. Eli calls it "The Mission. " Maybe they barely know one another, but already they've got a bond. Imagine meeting the only other two people in the world who think exactly like you, who have totally the same goals in life, who would rather hack into a phone company computer than do anything else you could suggest. And they live in Queens.
    Maybe it is a mission.
    They cut across the borough, and end up at Eli's house in Jamaica. They don't see his mom, even though she should be home from her job as a receptionist by now, so they don't have to endure the exquisite embarrassment of encountering her and worse! maybe having to say hello
    before they get to the privacy of Eli's room. Eli's dad is a cook, and his parents don't get along. A lot of people think they might get divorced.
    Eli's computer is set up in his bedroom, a room that screams "TEENAGE BOY LIVES HERE, " with a life-size poster of a bikini-clad model on the closet door, a white cordless phone, a second desk phone with two lines, a TV and cable box. Eli has a York cassette recorder, a Spectron telephone speaker amplifier, and a shoe box containing 120 floppy disks. The bed is made, the dresser is dusted, the clothes are put away. If Eli had a refrigerator in here, he might never have to come out of this room. Eli walks to the computer table and flips the switch on his Commodore 128. The machine whirs to life.
    Mark loves to explain, and Paul and Eli crowd around him at the monitor. As they log into the Laurelton switch to start exploring, he describes every command they're typing even the commands they already know
    in precise, easy-to-
    understand language. He knows everything. And Mark is just as excited by this session as they are, because he senses that finally he's met two other hackers who can ride at his pace. For his part, Mark will always think of this evening as "a meeting of the minds. " They forgot who they were, and where they were, and thought only about where they were headed.
    Mark has shown them how to use the NYNEX Packet Switched Network to jump off into other switches as well, and tonight they traipse around in the Hollis switch system for a while. In earlier phone conversations, Mark has told them different ways he's found to get into phone company computers, and Paul took it all in. So tonight Mark never has to repeat a phone number, never has to explain the meaning of a command to Paul. Mark types it and Paul absorbs it, because the progression of commands on the monitor is distinctly logical. Paul watches just once, and the new numbers are committed to memory. An hour later, when the three boys want to return to a computer they'd said good-bye to, Paul is at the keyboard and competently types in the commands again, no misses, no questions.
    Imagine the feeling. Every pathetic BBS is filled with philes on how to crack this computer system and how to crack that one. Anyone but a moron knows that it's baloney, a farce, techno-silliness that doesn't work. Any kid with a modem talks about hacking the phone system in the same way that any teenager talks about getting laid. In other words, it happens.
    But rarely and usually to someone else.
    But now, here they are, typing on a piece of $300 equipment,