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BREAKING AND ENTERING

place in the 1960s and 1970s: they had all learned about computers in school, profiting from the realization by educational authorities worldwide that their charges now needed to know as much about computers as about Latin if their societies were to have much of a future. The science fiction of the 1960s had become a reality, and though it was less than eight years since Jobs and Wozniak began assembling Apples in a garage in Santa Clara county, and less than a decade since the Altair had been introduced, computers were no longer frightening or mysterious to the new generation. Mainframes had been supplanted by small, compact PCs that were increasingly user-friendly, thus allowing even the least technically minded access to computing power.

Also among the group in the Chinese restaurant that night was a twenty-year-old hacker known as Triludan the Warrior, a close friend of Steve Gold. Triludan had learned about computing at his school in Hendon, north London. The terminal there, installed to aid computer science students, was connected to a mainframe at the local town hall. The school also had a very slow and out-of-date printer; in an emergency, though, work could be redirected to the town hall printer. When a job was finished, the operator at the town hall called the school and a teacher on a push-bike was dispatched the five miles to collect it. It wasn't long before Triludan had discovered a method to keep the town hall printer occupied all day churning out nonsense. Then a teacher would be sent, on his bike, to collect it. The prank was even better if played on a rainy day.

After he had left school Triludan discovered Prestel, a data and information service accessed by computer. The system was set up by British Telecom (the successor to the GPO) in the early 1980s and contained thousands of pages of news on finance, business, travel and sport as well as company reports and other matters. The information, updated regularly, was often supplied by outside contractors, including publishing houses and newspapers. The pages were read like an electronic news bulletin on the subscriber's computer screen, and were accessed with the help of the first page, which indexed the information available. Prestel was also supposed to provide other services, like on-line telephone directories and home shopping, but there was never sufficient demand.

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