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By Root 2051 0

a new direction: into the world of computers. Affirming as usual that the mere possibility of making free calls had never interested him, Draper claimed that what had attracted him to phreaking was the possibility, dangled before him by the Californian phreaks, that it was a way to contact a computer. By the early seventies he was veering between flat denials that he ever practiced phreaking any more and professions that "if I do anything it's for the pure knowledge of the System." He elaborated: "I do it for one reason and one reason only. I'm learning about a system. The phone company is a System. A computer is a system, do you understand? If I do what I do, it is only to explore a system. Computers, systems, that's my bag. The phone company is nothing but a computer."

Mark Bernay, another pseudonymous phreak, similarly attested that he had "gone beyond" telephony and was now "playing with computers more than playing with phones." He had found himself a programming job, only to be fired for carrying out phreak-like explorations in the company's computer system as the Midnight Stalker. An informer had turned him in (he seemed more upset by the low-tech banality of this than by the fact of being caught). The possibility had briefly been raised that he might be rehired as an investigator of other intruders, but it had been swiftly vetoed, and, Bernay admitted, justifiably so. "My personal thing with computers is just like with phones," he ended by remarking. "The kick is in finding out how to beat the system, how to get at things I'm not supposed to know about, how to do things with the system that I'm not supposed to be able to do."

The crux of the Esquire report was that many phreaks were taking this same step. They had found to their delight that they could use the simple computers now appearing on the hobby market to extend their phreaking explorations into new zones. They could dial up other computers, out there in the corporate or even military sphere, and discover a further class of terrae incognitae connected to the Bell network. This extension of phreaking into digital systems was set to be "the wave of the future," Rosenbaum guessed. And the implications if he was right might well be considerable. The phreaks' philosophy of sharing, access, technical virtuosity, and a buccaneering disregard for rules might do to the computerstill at this point a symbol of high-modern bureaucratic rationality-what it had tried to do to telecommunications in the 1920s-196os.

Rosenbaum concluded by trying to coin a name for this new level of exploring. He suggested computerfreaking. The name made sense, because, as he put it, the activity "suits the phone-phreak sensibility perfectly." But it never caught on, for the simple reason that the practice already had a name. It was called hacking.

HACKING

When asked where phreaking had originated, many in the early 1970s suggested that it came from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The notion revealed the extent to which hacking and phreaking had already converged, for MITwas well known to be the forts et origo of hacking. Yet it also had a basis in fact. Small numbers of students arriving at MIT in the late 195os and early 196os had enjoyed phreaking, and they were the same students who originated digital hacking too. They found their intellectual home in theTech Model Railroad Club (TMRC), which maintained a train set in one of the Institute's buildings. The layout included an extraordinarily elaborate electronic communication system, built from components donated by Western Electric, the manufacturing arm of AT&T. Model locomotives at MIT were therefore controlled by the same switching technologies that the phone phreaks exploited. It did not take these students long to discover that they could explore MIT's own phone network using TMRC techniques. By 1963 a TMRC acolyte named Stewart Nelson (who had experimented with phones and radio in Poughkeepsie before arriving at MIT) had made the obvious next step, using a PDP-I computer to sing MF tones into the AT&T network. Soon