UNDERGROUND
his personal details even more. He began, in his own words, 'moving toward full anonymity'. He invented the name Craig Bowen, and everyone in the underground came to know him by that name or his handle, Thunderbird1. He even opened a false bank account in the name of Bowen for the periodic vol- untary donations users sent into PI. It was never a lot of money, mostly $5 or $10, because students don't tend to have much money. He ploughed it all back into PI.
People had lots of reasons for wanting to get into the Inner Sanctum. Some wanted free copies of the latest software, usually pirated games from the US. Others wanted to share informa- tion and ideas about ways to break into computers, often those owned by local universities. Still others wanted to learn about how to manipulate the telephone system.
The private areas functioned like a royal court, populated by aristocrats and courtiers with varying seniority, loyalties and rivalries. The areas involved an intricate social order and respect was the name of the game. If you wanted admission, you had to walk a delicate line between showing your superiors that you possessed enough valuable hacking information to be elite and not showing them so much they would brand you a blabbermouth. A perfect bargaining chip was an old password for Melbourne University's dial-out.
The university's dial-out was a valuable thing. A hacker could ring up the university's computer, login as 'modem' and the machine would drop him into a modem which let him dial out again. He could then dial anywhere in the world, and the university would foot the phone bill. In the late 1980s, before the days of cheap, accessible Internet connections, the university dial-out meant a hacker could access anything from an underground BBS in Germany to a US military system in Panama. The password put the world at his fingertips.
A hacker aspiring to move into PI's Inner Sanctum wouldn't give out the current dial-out password in the public discussion areas. Most likely, if he was low in the pecking order, he wouldn't have such precious information. Even if he had managed to