Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace Read Free

after all, the valedictorian of Thomas A. Edison High School's Class of 1988. Winner of the all-city computer programming competition.
    A boy with a future.
    Paul learned to read before he got to kindergarten. He knew his colors and his numbers, and his favorite book was Three Billy Goats Gruff. He was captivated by the troll under the bridge. Maybe he would be all his life, maybe not, but at four, Paul was simultaneously drawn to and repelled by the powerful monster that lurked below. This was the authority figure that stood between you and where you wanted to go.
    By the time Paul was six, he knew why he wanted to cross the bridge. He learned about the computer on the other side.
    It looked like a typewriter but had extra keys. He saw it at his dad's office Christmas party in 1976. The winking cursor on the phosphorous screen enchanted him. How did it work? The boxy computer was one of twenty that sat, like a museum exhibit, behind a Plexiglas wall in the corner. Paul was taking the grand tour of the Royal Composing Room in Manhattan, where his dad was a typesetter; it was the first time he'd been to the office, and everyone was calling him Paulie, just like his dad did. When one of the guys saw him staring at the cursor, with that look in his eye, he took Paul and his father into the climate-controlled, dust-free sanctum where the computers hummed.
    "Do you want to play around with one?" the guy asked.
    Paul sat down at the keyboard, which was similar to his mom's manual typewriter. Using only his index fingers, he pecked in each letter of a short article from that day's newspaper, and watched as the words miraculously formed on the monitor.
    He could hit a key and just erase any error, type the word again. He typed the article perfectly.
    The same guy came back, inspected Paul's work, and printed it. Out came a piece of plastic film, four inches by five inches, with the article, some story about the old JFK administration, typeset on it in black letters. Paul held it, still warm and smelling of chemical fixatives, and realized: If a computer did that, what can't such a wondrous machine accomplish?
    It was software that made the computer work. It was the code, the precise and logical lines of instructions, that caused the silicon chips to react, just like neurons firing in a brain. It wasn't long before Paul was engrossed in magazines, reading about and actually digesting the rudiments of computer programming. He read Byte, and Compute!, and Personal Computing. He didn't have a computer of his own, and wouldn't for a few years, in fact he didn't even have one at school.
    But that didn't stop Paul from becoming a programmer. He learned to speak the programming language called BASIC.
    Writing programs without having a machine to run them is like learning chess moves without a chessboard. You have to hold everything in your mind. But here's the thing about Paul: one thought follows another logically in rapid-fire progression. Paul thinks like a computer, so it wasn't so hard for him to start writing for one.
    The first program the eleven-year-old ever wrote was a challenge he read in a magazine: Devise a program that will search two groups of twenty numbers and tell which is the highest in each group. Paul thought about this for a while, thought about how it should work, with each command flowing from the previous one so that the problem was solved methodically. And then he wrote:
    5 HI = 0
    10 DIM A(20), B(20) 15 FOR I = 1 to 20 20 READ A(I)
    25 IF A(I)> HI THEN HI =A(I)
    30 NEXT I

    35 PRINT "HIGHEST A VALUE IS "; HI
    40 HI = 0
    45 FOR I = 1 TO 20
    50 READ B(I)
    55 IF B(I) > HI THEN HI =B(I)
    60 NEXT I
    65 PRINT "HIGHEST B VALUE IS "; HI
    70 END
    100 DATA 5, 8, 2, 15, 7, 3, 7, 8, 36, 18,
    45, 32, 68, 55, 44, 0, 16, 7, 8, 2
    110 DATA 6, 4, 6, 8, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4,
    3, 2, 14, 15, 33, 22, ll
    The program would sift through the two sets of numbers at the end and identify 68 and 33 as the highest. Paul could tell just by looking