As a youngster, the romance of hacking took hold of my imagination. Computers were always my passion, and the myth (legend?) of kids who moved a satellite by messing around were well known and the subject of daydreaming. But where to begin? While still working a student job, I got my hands on the “Hackers Handbook". To put things in perspective, the internet was young, Microsoft did not believe in CD-ROMs and “Do you Netscape” was the web browsing term. Modems were the way you connected. I printed the entire “Handbook” on a dot matrix printer, ready to enrich myself with the knowledge of hackers. The text was about BAUD, modems and the protocols used by BBSs. I found the reading as exiting as a student who got his hands on a banned copy of The Little Red Book. But the content proved rather less than insightful. Yes, hacking was different when the words were uttered “the beauty of the baud” (from the original Hackers Manifesto), but times have changed and changed again in a very short period of time.
