📸

Sometimes, if the telephone box was in a public area, he would run two long wires from the clips so he could sit behind the bushes and listen to conversations without getting caught. To find out whose phone he was listening to he would simply use his butt set to call the operator and pretend to be a lineman. He would give the correct code and then ask, 'What's this number?' Despite being fourteen, he was never refused. 'So long as you know the lingo you can get people to do anything,' Pat says.

Gladwyne was a dull place. Line tapping was just something to do. If he was really lucky he might get to listen in on a girl talking to her date. 'It was basically boring and mundane but at that age any tittle-tattle seemed exciting,' he says.

Pat learned about phreaking from a guy he met at Radio Shack. (Actually they were both combing the shops for electronic parts and met through their shared obsession.) Doctor Diode, as his new friend styled himself, didn't really know a great deal more about phreaking than Pat, so the two learned the procedures together. Their progress from phreaking to hacking was a natural step. They began playing with the school's computer. Then they discovered that with a modem they could call into a maintenance port - a dial-up - at the phone company's switching office. The phone company, Pat said, was the natural target for phreakers-turned-hackers: it was huge, it was secret-ive and it was a lot of fun to play on.

Breaking into a switch through a maintenance port shouldn't have been easy, but in those days security was light. 'The phone company for years and years and years never had any problems because they were so secret,' Pat says. 'They never expected anyone to try to break into their systems.' The switch used an operating system called UNIX, designed by the phone company and relatively simple to use. 'It had lots of menus,' recalls Pat with satisfaction. Menus are the lists of functions and services available to the computer user, or in this case computer hacker. Used skilfully, menus are like a map of the computer.

As Pat learned his way around the switch he began to play little jokes, like resetting the time. This, he says, was absurdly simple: the command for the clock was 'time'. Pat would reset the clock from a peak time - when telephone charges were highest - to an off-peak

📸