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throw data to one another at high speed through the public telephone
network. UUCP is a radically decentralized, not-for-profit network of
UNIX computers. There are tens of thousands of these UNIX machines.
Some are small, but many are powerful and also link to other networks.
UUCP has certain arcane links to major networks such as JANET,
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EasyNet, BITNET, JUNET, VNET, DASnet, PeaceNet and FidoNet, as well
as the gigantic Internet. (The so-called "Internet" is not actually a net-
work itself, but rather an "internetwork" connections standard that
allows several globe-spanning computer networks to communicate with
one another. Readers fascinated by the weird and intricate tangles of
modern computer networks may enjoy John S. Quarterman's authorita-
tive 719-page explication, *The Matrix,* Digital Press, 1990.)
A skilled user of Terminus' UNIX machine could send and receive elec-
tronic mail from almost any major computer network in the world.
Netsys was not called a "board" per se, but rather a "node." "Nodes"
were larger, faster, and more sophisticated than mere "boards," and for
hackers, to hang out on internationally-connected "nodes" was quite the
step up from merely hanging out on local "boards."
Terminus's Netsys node in Maryland had a number of direct links to
other, similar UUCP nodes, run by people who shared his interests and
at least something of his free-wheeling attitude. One of these nodes was
Jolnet, owned by Richard Andrews, who, like Terminus, was an inde-
pendent UNIX consultant. Jolnet also ran UNIX, and could be contacted at
high speed by mainframe machines from all over the world. Jolnet was
quite a sophisticated piece of work, technically speaking, but it was still
run by an individual, as a private, not-for-profit hobby. Jolnet was
mostly used by other UNIX programmers for mail, storage, and access
to networks. Jolnet supplied access network access to about two hundred
people, as well as a local junior college.
Among its various features and services, Jolnet also carried *Phrack*
magazine.
For reasons of his own, Richard Andrews had become suspicious of a new
user called "Robert Johnson." Richard Andrews took it upon himself to
have a look at what "Robert Johnson" was storing in Jolnet. And
Andrews found the E911 Document.
"Robert Johnson" was the Prophet from the Legion of Doom, and the
E911 Document was illicitly copied data from Prophet's raid on the
BellSouth computers.
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The E911 Document, a particularly illicit piece of digital property, was
about to resume its long, complex, and disastrous career.
It struck Andrews as fishy that someone not a telephone employee should
have a document referring to the "Enhanced 911 System." Besides, the
document itself bore an obvious warning.
"WARNING: NOT FOR USE OR DISCLOSURE OUTSIDE BELLSOUTH OR ANY
OF ITS SUBSIDIARIES EXCEPT UNDER WRITTEN AGREEMENT."
These standard nondisclosure tags are often appended to all sorts of cor-
porate material. Telcos as a species are particularly notorious for
stamping most everything in sight as "not for use or disclosure." Still,
this particular piece of data was about the 911 System. That sounded
bad to Rich Andrews.
Andrews was not prepared to ignore this sort of trouble. He thought it
would be wise to pass the document along to a friend and acquaintance on
the UNIX network, for consultation. So, around September 1988,
Andrews sent yet another copy of the E911 Document electronically to
an AT&T employee, one Charles Boykin, who ran a UNIX-based node
called "attctc" in Dallas, Texas.
"Attctc" was the property of AT&T, and was run from AT&T's Customer
Technology Center in Dallas, hence the name "attctc." "Attctc" was bet-
ter-known as "Killer," the name of the machine that the system was
running on. "Killer" was a hefty, powerful, AT&T 3B2 500 model, a
multi-user, multi-tasking UNIX platform with 32 meg of memory and a
mind-boggling 3.2 Gigabytes of storage. When Killer had first arrived
in Texas, in 1985, the 3B2 had been one of AT&T's great white hopes for
going head- to-head with IBM for the corporate computer-hardware
market. "Killer" had been shipped to the Customer Technology Center in
the Dallas Infomart, essentially a high-technology mall, and there it
sat, a demonstration model.
Charles Boykin, a veteran AT&T hardware and digital communications
expert, was a local technical backup man for the AT&T 3B2 system. As
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a display model in the Infomart mall, "Killer" had little to do, and it
seemed a shame to waste the system's capacity. So Boykin ingeniously
wrote some UNIX bulletin-board software for "Killer," and plugged the
machine in to the local phone network. "Killer's" debut in late 1985
made it the first publicly available UNIX site in the state of Texas.
Anyone who wanted to play was welcome.
The machine immediately attracted an electronic community. It joined
the UUCP network, and offered network links to over eighty other com-
puter sites, all of which became dependent on Killer for their links to
the greater world of cyberspace. And it wasn't just for the big guys;
personal computer users also stored freeware programs for the Amiga,
the Apple, the IBM and the Macintosh on Killer's vast 3,200 meg
archives. At one time, Killer had the largest library of public-domain
Macintosh software in Texas.
Eventually, Killer attracted about 1,500 users, all busily communicat-
ing, uploading and downloading, getting mail, gossipping, and linking to
arcane and distant networks.
Boykin received no pay for running Killer. He considered it good pub-
licity for the AT&T 3B2 system (whose sales were somewhat less than
stellar), but he also simply enjoyed the vibrant community his skill
had created. He gave away the bulletin-board UNIX software he had
written, free of charge.
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