In 1981 IBM announced a new model -a stand-alone machine, fully loaded with a CPU, software, memory, utilities, storage. They called it the "personal computer." You could go anywhere and do anything with one of these hot rods. Soon kid
s abandoned their Chevys to explore the guts of a "Commie 64" or a "Trash-SO."
The 1983 movie War Games shone a flashlight onto the hidden face of hacking, and warned audiences nationwide that hackers could got into any computer system. Hackers gleaned a different message from the film. It implied that hacking could got you girls.
Cute girls.
The territory was changing. More settlers were moving into the online world. ARPANET was morphing into the Internet, and the popularity of bulletin-board systems exploded. In Milwaukee a group of hackers calling themselves the 414's (their area code.
Duh.) broke into systems at institutions ranging from the Los Alamos Laboratories to Manhattan's Memorial Sloan-Keftering Cancer Center. Then the cops put the arm on them.