In the early eighties, the computer underground, like the computer industry itself, was centered in the United - States. But technology flows quickly across boundaries, as do fads and trends, and the ethos of the technological counterculture became another slice of Americana that, like Hollywood movies and Coca-Cola, was embraced internationally.
Although the United States nurtured the computer underground, the conditions that spawned it existed in other countries as well. There were plenty of young men all over the world who would become obsessed with PC technology and the vistas it offered, and many who would be attracted to the new society, with its special jargon and rituals. The renegade spirit that created the computer underground in the first place exists worldwide.
In 1984, the British branch of the technological counterculture probably began with a small group that used to meet on an ad hoc basis in a Chinese restaurant in North London. The group had a floating membership, but usually numbered about a dozen; its meetings were an excuse to eat and drink, and to exchange hacker lore and gossip.
Steve Gold, then a junior accountant with the Regional Health Authority in Sheffield and a part-time computer journalist, was twenty-five, and as one of the oldest of the group, had been active when phone phreaking first came to England. Gold liked to tell stories about Captain Crunch, the legendary emissary from America who had carried the fad across the Atlantic.
The Captain can take most of the credit for exporting his hobby to Great Britain during his holiday there in 1970. Because the U.S. and British telephone systems were entirely different, MF-ers were of no use in England-- except, of course, to reduce charges on calls originating in America. The British telephone network didn't use the same multifrequency tones (it used 2280 cycles), so the equipment had to be modified or new ways had to be devised to fool the British system. Naturally the Captain had risen to the challenge and carried out the most audacious phreak in England. The British telephone system was hierarchical, with three tiers: local switching offices, zone exchanges comprised of a number of local offices, and group offices linking various zones. Much of the equipment in the local exchanges in those days dated back to the 1920S; in the zone and group offices the electronics had been put in during the 1950S, when Britain introduced national long-distance dialing, or STD (Standard Trunk Dialing), as it was then known. The Captain quickly discovered that users could avoid expensive long-distance charges by routing their calls from the local exchange to one nearby. The mechanism was simple: all a caller needed to do was dial the area code--known in Britain as the STD code--for the nearest out-of-area local exchange and then add a 9. The 9 would give the caller another dial tone, and he could then dial through to any other number in the country. He would only be charged, however, for the call to the nearby local exchange. The process was known as chaining, or sometimes bunny hopping.
With his usual enthusiasm for exploring phone networks, Captain Crunch decided to test the limits of the system. He notified a friend in Edinburgh to wait for his call from London while the Captain began a long, slow crawl up through local exchanges, dialing from one to the other, through England and then into Scotland. He is reputed to have chained six local exchanges; he could hear the call slowly clicking its way through exchange after exchange (the call was being routed through 1920S equipment) on its snaillike progression northward. Thirty minutes later the Captain's call finally rang at his friend's house. The connection, it is said, was terrible.
