The Corner Pub

were all being transported to a penal settlement on another planet. It was a story people in the Australian underground could relate to. One of the lead characters, a sort of heroic anti-hero, had been sentenced to prison for computer hacking. His big mistake, he told fellow rebels, was that he had relied on other people. He trusted them. He should have worked alone.

Craig Bowen had no idea of how true that sentiment would ring in a matter of months.

Bowen's place was a hub of current and future lights in the computer underground. The Wizard. The Force. Powerspike. Phoenix. Electron. Nom. Prime Suspect. Mendax. Train Trax. Some, such as Prime Suspect, merely passed through, occa- sionally stopping in to check out the action and greet friends. Others, such as Nom, were part of the close-knit PI family. Nom helped Bowen set up PI. Like many early members of the underground, they met through AUSOM, an Apple users' society in Melbourne. Bowen wanted to run ASCII Express, a program which allowed people to transfer files between their own computers and PI. But, as usual, he and everyone he knew only had a pirated copy of the program. No manuals. So Nom and Bowen spent one weekend picking apart the program by themselves. They were each at home, on their own machines, with copies. They sat on the phone for hours working through how the program worked. They wrote their own manual for other people in the underground suffering under the same lack of documentation. Then they got it up and running on PI.

Making your way into the various groups in a BBS such as PI or Zen had benefits besides hacking information. If you wanted to drop your mantle of anonymity, you could join a pre-packaged, close-knit circle of friends. For example, one clique of PI people were fanatical followers of the film The Blues Brothers. Every Friday night, this group dressed up in Blues Brothers costumes of a dark suit, white shirt, narrow tie, Rayban sunglasses and, of course, the snap-brimmed hat. One couple brought their child, dressed as a mini-Blues Brother. The group of Friday night regulars made their way at 11.30 to