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strobes, back lights and lava lamps – those gift-shop relics with blobs of wax floating in oil. There were books too, mostly science fiction.

When Fry Guy was working at his computer terminal, he was transported far from his home town of Elwood, a south Indiana community of 10,000 souls. He was pretty sure his parents, and even his older sister and kid brother, didn’t know where he was going. The space the computer linked him to was huge. With the electronic box and the phone line, he could traverse the continent, jumping through the endless array of communications links and telephone exchanges, dropping down into other computers in the US or in foreign countries. All he needed were numbers, the access phone numbers for other computers.

He would explore. Once he ended up in Finland, in electronic contact with a computer that spoke only Finnish. Sometimes he accessed Altos, a computer in Munich, Germany. It was a business computer, but the company that owned it was tolerant: the system had become a message centre for computer freaks – hackers – like himself.

It was when he was on Altos that he decided on his ‘handle’, or alias. He got into an electronic chat with one of the other computer freaks who hung out on the Altos computer, the typed messages going back and forth between Indiana, the computer in Munich and West Berlin, where the other guy lived. His new friend introduced himself as Pengo. Fry Guy didn’t have an alias at the time, and it would have been against the hacker code to use his real name. He looked around for inspiration. On the television in the other room he could hear a commercial for McDonald’s: ‘We are the fry guys,’ the jingle went. So he became Fry Guy.

The other computer hackers he met in the new world were very much like him, though some of them worked in gangs – like the Legion of Doom, a US group, or Chaos in Germany, or DPAC, an East Coast gang. Fry Guy didn’t join a gang; he wanted to work on his own. If he started blabbing to other hackers, he could get busted. Secrecy was a protective cloak.

Fry Guy liked to explore the phone system. Phones were far more than just a means to make a call: Indiana Bell led to an immense network of exchanges and connections, to phones, to other com-

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