Someone had discovered a stack of BT NUIs and
posted them on BBSes across England.
Pad followed the directions in the BBS file and soon found himself in
the German chat channel. Like Theorem, he marvelled at the brave new
live world of Altos. It was wonderful, a big international party.
After all, it wasn't every day he got to talk with Australians, Swiss,
Germans, Italians and Americans. Before long, he had taken up hacking
like so many other Altos regulars.
Hacking as a concept had always intrigued him. As a teenager, the film
War Games had dazzled him. The idea that computers could communicate
with each over telephone lines enthralled the sixteen-year-old,
filling his mind with new ideas. Sometime after that he saw a
television report on a group of hackers who claimed that they had used
their skills to move satellites around in space--the same story which
had first caught Electron's imagination.
Pad had grown up in Greater Manchester. More than a century before,
the region had been a textile boom-town. But the thriving economy did
not translate into great wealth for the masses. In the early 1840s,
Friedrich Engels had worked in his father's cotton-milling factory in
the area, and the suffering
he saw in the region influenced his most famous work, The Communist
Manifesto, published in 1848.
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