UNDERGROUND

Sure, if you bought a $100 000 system, the company would give you a few sets of operating manuals, but that was well beyond the reach of a teenage hacker. In general, informa- tion was hoarded - by the computer manufacturers, by the big companies which bought the systems, by the system adminis- trators and even by the universities.

Learning on-line was slow and almost as difficult. Most hackers used 300 or 1200 baud modems. Virtually all access to these big, expensive machines was illegal. Every moment on-line was a risky proposition. High schools never had these sorts of expensive machines. Although many universities had systems, the administrators were usually miserly with time on-line for students. In most cases, students only got accounts on the big machines in their second year of computer science studies. Even then, student accounts were invariably on the university's oldest, clunkiest machine. And if you weren't a comp-sci student, forget it. Indulging your intellectual curiosity in VMS systems would never be anything more than a pipe dream.

Even if you did manage to overcome all the roadblocks and develop some programming experience in VMS systems, for example, you might only be able to access a small number of machines on any given network. The X.25 networks connected a large number of machines which used very different oper- ating systems. Many, such as Primes, were not in the least bit intuitive. So if you knew VMS and you hit a Prime machine, well, that was pretty much it.

Unless, of course, you happened to belong to a clan of hackers like The Realm. Then you could call up the BBS and post a message. 'Hey, I found a really cool Primos system at this address. Ran into problems trying to figure the parameters of the Netlink command. Ideas anyone?' And someone from your team would step forward to help.

In The Realm, Force tried to assemble a diverse group of Australia's best hackers, each with a different area of exper- tise. And he happened to be the resident expert in Prime computers.