He soon upgraded his system by selling off his unwanted possessions and bought a better computer, a color monitor, and various other external devices such as a printer and the electronic box that would give his computer access to the wider world. He installed three telephone lines: one linked to the computer for data transmission, one for voice, and one that could be used for either.
Eventually he stumbled across the access number to an electronic message center called Atlantic Alliance, which was run by computer hackers. It provided him with the basic information on hacking; the rest he learned from telecommunications manuals.
Often he would work on the computer for hours on end, sometimes sitting up all night hunched over the keyboard. His room was a sixties time warp filled with psychedelic posters, strobes, black lights, lava lamps, those gift-shop relics with blobs of wax floating in oil, and a collection of science fiction books. But his computer terminal transported him to a completely different world that encompassed the whole nation and girdled the globe. With the electronic box and a phone line he could cover enormous distances, jumping through an endless array of communications links and telephone exchanges, dropping down into other computer systems almost anywhere on earth. Occasionally he accessed Altos, a business computer in Munich, Germany owned by a company that was tolerant of hackers. Inevitably, it became an international message center for computer freaks.
Hackers often use large systems like these to exchange information and have electronic chats with one another, but it is against hacker code to use one's real name. Instead, they use "handles," nicknames like The Tweaker, Doc Cypher and Knightmare. Fry Guy's handle came from a commercial for McDonald's that said "We are the fry guys."
Most of the other computer hackers he met were loners like he was, but some of them worked in gangs, such as the Legion of Doom, a U.S. group, or Chaos in Germany. Fry Guy didn't join a gang, because he preferred working in solitude. Besides, if he started blabbing to other hackers, he could get busted.
Fry Guy liked to explore the phone system. Phones were more than just a means to make a call: Indiana Bell led to an immense network of exchanges and connections, to phones, to other computers, and to an international array of interconnected phone systems and data transmission links. It was an electronic highway network that was unbelievably vast.
He learned how to dial into the nearest telephone exchange on his little Commodore and hack into the switch, the computer that controls all the phones in the area. He discovered that each phone is represented by a long code, the LEN (Line Equipment Number), which assigns functions and services to the phone, such as the chosen long-distance carrier, call forwarding, and so on. He knew how to manipulate the code to reroute calls, reassign numbers, and do dozens of other tricks, but best of all, he could manipulate the code so that all his calls would be free.
After a while Indiana Bell began to seem tame. It was a convenient launching pad, but technologically speaking it was a wasteland. So he moved on to BellSouth in Atlanta, which had all of the latest communications technology. There he became so familiar with the system that the other hackers recognized it as his SoI--sphere of influence--just as a New York hacker called Phiber Optik became the king of NYNEX (the New York-New England telephone system), and another hacker called Control C claimed the Michigan network. It didn't mean that BellSouth was his alone, only that the other members of the computer underworld identified him as its best hacker.
At the age of fifteen he started using chemicals as a way of staying awake. Working at his computer terminal up to twenty hours a day, sleeping only two or three hours a night, and sometimes not at all, the chemicals--uppers, speed-- kept him alert, punching away at his keyboard, exploring his new world.
But outside this private world, life was getting more confusing. Problems with school and family were beginning to accumulate, and out of pure frustration, he thought of a plan to make some money.
In 1989 Fry Guy gathered all of the elements for his first hack of CSA. He had spent two years exploring computer systems and the phone company, and each new trick he learned added one more layer to his knowledge. He had become familiar with important computer operating systems, and he knew how the phone company worked. Since his plan involved hacking into CSA and then the phone system, it was essential to be expert in both.
