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Sometime later one of the lab monitors ratted me out to the system administrator. Next thing I knew, three campus police officers stormed the computer lab. They held me until my mom came to pick me up.

The department chairman, who had given me permission to use the lab and let me log in on his own account, was furious. But there wasn’t much he could do: in those days, there were no computer laws on the books so there was nothing to charge me with. Still, my privileges were canceled, and I was ordered to stay off the campus.

My mom was told, “Next month a new California law goes into effect making what Kevin is doing a crime.” (The U.S. Congress wouldn’t get around to passing a federal law about computer crime for another four years, but a litany of my activities would be used to convince Congress to pass the new law.)

In any case, I wasn’t put off by the threat. Not long after that visit, I found a way to divert calls to Directory Assistance from people in Rhode Island, so the calls would come to me instead. How do you have fun with people who are trying to get a phone number? A typical call in one of my routines went like this:

Me: What city, please?

Caller: Providence.

Me: What is the name, please?

Caller: John Norton.

Me: Is this a business or a residence?

Caller: Residence.

Me: The number is 836, 5 one-half 66.

At this point the caller was usually either baffled or indignant.

Caller: How do I dial one-half?!

Me: Go pick up a new phone that has uh-half on it.

The reactions I got were hilarious.

In those days, two separate phone companies served different parts of the Los Angeles area. General Telephone and Electronics Corporation (GTE) served the northern part of the San Fernando Valley, where we lived; any calls over twelve miles were charged at a long-distance rate. Of course I didn’t want to run up my mom’s phone bill, so I was making some calls using a local ham radio auto patch.

One day on the air I had heated words with the control operator of the repeater over what he labeled “weird calls” I was making. He had noticed I was regularly keying in a long series of digits when I was using the auto patch. I wasn’t about to explain that those digits I was entering allowed me to make free long-distance calls through a long-distance provider called MCI. Though he had no clue about what I was actually doing, he didn’t like the fact that I was using the auto patch in a strange way. A guy listening in contacted me afterward on the air, said his name was Lewis De Payne, and gave me his phone number. I called him that evening. Lewis said he was intrigued by what I was doing.

We met and became friends, a relationship that lasted for two decades. Of Argentinean heritage, Lewis was thin and geeky, with short-cropped black hair, slicked down and brushed straight back, and sporting a mustache that he probably thought made him look older. On hacking projects, Lewis was the guy I would come to trust most in the world, though he came with a personality filled with contradictions. Very polite, but always trying to have the upper hand. Nerdy, with his out-of-fashion clothing choice of turtlenecks and wide-bottomed trousers, yet with all the social graces. Low-key yet arrogant.

Lewis and I had similar senses of humor. I think any hobby that doesn’t provide some fun and a few laughs now and then probably isn’t worth the time and effort you put into it. Lewis and I were on the same wavelength. Like our “McDonald’s hacks.” We found out how to modify a two-meter radio so we could make our voices come out of the speaker where customers placed their orders at the drive-through of a fast-food restaurant. We’d head over to a McDonald’s, park nearby where we could watch the action without being noticed, and tune the handheld radio to the restaurant’s frequency.

A cop car would pull in to the drive-through lane, and when it got up to the speaker, Lewis or I would announce, “I’m sorry. We don’t serve cops here. You’ll have to go to Jack in the Box.” Once a woman pulled up