place that I began moving some of my clothes there. We never really decided,
Okay, let’s live together
. It just sort of happened.
We loved biking together. We loved going to the beach with a bottle of wine. We loved hiking in the Chantry Flat, in Arcadia, a beautiful area with waterfalls that’s right in Los Angeles County but feels like being in a forest—really cool, such a refreshing escape for a pale guy like me who sat in front of a computer all day and all night.
I didn’t even mind that she was a lazy housekeeper, with a big pile of her dirty clothes usually occupying space on the bedroom floor. I’ve never been a neat freak like my parents, but I do like things tidy and organized. The two of us were alike in so many other ways that when it came to the condition of the apartment, I just closed my eyes.
Since I didn’t have a job, I signed up for an extension course at UCLA in Westwood, not far from us. Bonnie went with me to register.
But it was a deception—the first time in our relationship that I was, in a sense, cheating on her. I’d go out three evenings a week saying I was going to class, and instead I’d drive over to Lenny DiCicco’s work and hack with him until almost sunup. It was a pretty rotten thing to do.
On the nights when I didn’t go out, I’d sit at my computer in the apartment, using Bonnie’s telephone line for hacking while she read by herself, watched television by herself, and then went to bed by herself. I could say it was my way of handling the disappointment of those two almost-but-oh-never-mind jobs, but I’d be lying. Sure, I was having problems handling the massive disappointment. But that wasn’t the reason. The real reason was simply that I was in the thrall of a powerful obsession.
Though that had to be frustrating for her, she was somehow as accepting as I was about her less-than-admirable housekeeping. After a few months of living together, we both knew we were committed to the relationship. We were in love, we started talking about getting married, and we began saving money. Whatever was left over from my paycheck (I was hired by Fromin’s Delicatessen to migrate them over to a point-of-sale system), I would convert into hundred-dollar bills that I stashed in the inside breast pocket of a jacket in our coat closet.
I was twenty-three years old, living in my girlfriend’s apartment and spending virtually every waking hour on my computer. I was David on my PC, attacking the Goliath networks of the major telephone companies throughout the United States.
The phone company control systems used a bastardized version of Unix, which I wanted to learn more about. A company in Northern California called Santa Cruz Operations, or SCO, was developing a Unix-based operating system called Xenix for PCs. If I could get my hands on a copy of the source code, that would give me a chance to study the inner workings of the operating system on my own computer. From Pacific Bell, I was able to obtain SCO’s secret dial-up numbers for its computer network, and then manipulated an employee into revealingher username and changing her password to a new password that I had provided, which gave me access.
At one point while immersed in studying the details of SCO’s system trying to locate the source code I wanted to study, I noticed a system admin was watching my every move. I sent him a message, “Why are you watching me?”
To my surprise, he answered: “It’s my job,” his message said.
Just to see how far he’d allow me to go, I wrote back that I wanted my own account on the system. He created an account for me, even giving me the username I requested: “hacker.” Knowing that he’d be keeping the account under surveillance, I just distracted him by poking around at nothing in particular. I was able to locate the code I wanted, but in the end I never tried to download it because the transfer would have taken forever over my 2,400-baud modem.
But that wasn’t going
Okay, let’s live together
. It just sort of happened.
We loved biking together. We loved going to the beach with a bottle of wine. We loved hiking in the Chantry Flat, in Arcadia, a beautiful area with waterfalls that’s right in Los Angeles County but feels like being in a forest—really cool, such a refreshing escape for a pale guy like me who sat in front of a computer all day and all night.
I didn’t even mind that she was a lazy housekeeper, with a big pile of her dirty clothes usually occupying space on the bedroom floor. I’ve never been a neat freak like my parents, but I do like things tidy and organized. The two of us were alike in so many other ways that when it came to the condition of the apartment, I just closed my eyes.
Since I didn’t have a job, I signed up for an extension course at UCLA in Westwood, not far from us. Bonnie went with me to register.
But it was a deception—the first time in our relationship that I was, in a sense, cheating on her. I’d go out three evenings a week saying I was going to class, and instead I’d drive over to Lenny DiCicco’s work and hack with him until almost sunup. It was a pretty rotten thing to do.
On the nights when I didn’t go out, I’d sit at my computer in the apartment, using Bonnie’s telephone line for hacking while she read by herself, watched television by herself, and then went to bed by herself. I could say it was my way of handling the disappointment of those two almost-but-oh-never-mind jobs, but I’d be lying. Sure, I was having problems handling the massive disappointment. But that wasn’t the reason. The real reason was simply that I was in the thrall of a powerful obsession.
Though that had to be frustrating for her, she was somehow as accepting as I was about her less-than-admirable housekeeping. After a few months of living together, we both knew we were committed to the relationship. We were in love, we started talking about getting married, and we began saving money. Whatever was left over from my paycheck (I was hired by Fromin’s Delicatessen to migrate them over to a point-of-sale system), I would convert into hundred-dollar bills that I stashed in the inside breast pocket of a jacket in our coat closet.
I was twenty-three years old, living in my girlfriend’s apartment and spending virtually every waking hour on my computer. I was David on my PC, attacking the Goliath networks of the major telephone companies throughout the United States.
The phone company control systems used a bastardized version of Unix, which I wanted to learn more about. A company in Northern California called Santa Cruz Operations, or SCO, was developing a Unix-based operating system called Xenix for PCs. If I could get my hands on a copy of the source code, that would give me a chance to study the inner workings of the operating system on my own computer. From Pacific Bell, I was able to obtain SCO’s secret dial-up numbers for its computer network, and then manipulated an employee into revealingher username and changing her password to a new password that I had provided, which gave me access.
At one point while immersed in studying the details of SCO’s system trying to locate the source code I wanted to study, I noticed a system admin was watching my every move. I sent him a message, “Why are you watching me?”
To my surprise, he answered: “It’s my job,” his message said.
Just to see how far he’d allow me to go, I wrote back that I wanted my own account on the system. He created an account for me, even giving me the username I requested: “hacker.” Knowing that he’d be keeping the account under surveillance, I just distracted him by poking around at nothing in particular. I was able to locate the code I wanted, but in the end I never tried to download it because the transfer would have taken forever over my 2,400-baud modem.
But that wasn’t going
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