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name, one that doesn't require a password. Nick had learned the default user-name from his work at BBA and his constant reading of ICL promotional material, manuals and security information. And because QMC had never changed its default user-name, it had left its back door wide open – so on his first try Nick walked right into the college's mainframe ICL with just a few simple manipulations of his Commodore.

The sole drawback from Nick's point of view was that the low-security user-name gave him only restricted access to the computer. The QMC machine had a strict hierarchy of user status, and the environment of low-security users – the areas on the computer they could enter – was severely limited. Most ordinary users had higher status, though their environment was usually restricted by the nature of their tasks. At the apex of the hierarchy, as with Prestel, was the system manager, who had access to everything. At QMC the sysman is in complete control of the computer, assigning status to other users, overseeing the functioning of the system and managing the programs and data.

Nick's objective was to capture sysman status. Without it his options were too limited, his environment too restricted. He began searching through the files, using his knowledge of the minutiae of ICL operating systems to find his way through the electronic pathways of the QMC computer. He ran into walls or traps designed to keep him out of restricted areas, but he kept trying.

Nick's hobby, his only one, was collecting unlisted commands for ICL computers. These are keyboard operations that the company doesn't document, which can be discovered by experimentation. Sometimes these got him around the traps and further into the system. Slowly he moved through the back alleys of the QMC systems until finally he was able to access the operator libraries, the collection of programs that manage the computer. He knew that among the programs there were the tools to raise his status. He had been hacking for hours by then, but he didn't notice the time or his own tiredness. He played with commands, his little PC sending signals from his bedroom in Enfield through the telephone lines to the mainframe at QMC. He went through the programs systematically, coaxing the ICL, trying to outsmart the security systems that had been put in

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