It was a game, definitely, though because I was an otherwise quiet boy and those rebellious streaks had to get out somehow, it was also something more. But before anyone had a chance of getting that far, the first thing people noticed was the system felt eerily smooth to use. Here’s why.

Let me start with a little background. Thirty years ago, after your computer made a connection to another, text slipped across the wire to you one line at a time, each new line appearing across the bottom of the screen, pushing the previous lines up. It could not scroll back up to show you something you’d previously seen, and the spewing of text could not reliably jump backwards at all without deleting everything that it had fed to you previously. It could clear your screen and start over again at the top, but that was it. To make things even more tedious, you were fed each row of text only a little bit more slowly than most people could read.

When this is your only interface to a remote machine, certain delays became really, really annoying. Over time, system operators came up with all kinds of little tricks to help reduce these terrific irritations, and these modifications would eventually get shared with or copied by others.

I used to spend a lot of time being very concerned about how to make my board the best possible experience, given the constraints. One of my favorite tricks was the spinner. It was so successful, that one way or another it’s still leveraged in modern apps, even if it’s slightly different now than it was then.

Here’s how it worked. When you, as a user, asked for some information from the remote system, and the system had reason to believe that it might take a couple of seconds — such as checking to see which of a system’s boards have how many new messages since the last time you logged in — then while waiting for the information to load from a slow-ass floppy disk, the system would loop what it was sending across the wire between a series of characters, like this:

– / ! \ – / ! \ – / ! \

… but the trick was that it would send a backspace after each character, giving the impression of a line spinning in place. Crazy. In case that’s not super-clear — and I remember people freaking out the first time they saw it: “How do you do that?!” — here’s the breakdown. First you would see the hyphen, then it would be replaced by the forward-slash, then the forward-slash would quickly be replaced by the exclamation point, then the backslash, then the hyphen again. And this was cool because it was one of the rare times you ever got feedback from a remote system while it was in the process of doing something for you. You could be sure that your call had not accidentally been dropped, maybe because you forgot to disable call-waiting before you dialed out with your modem, since the system was clearly telling you that it was doing something. It was genius.

The only thing smarter than that, I figured, was not having to show a spinner at all because your system was faster than anything anyone could imagine at the time. Through my RAM disk, I had found a way to avoid having to reach out to a floppy drive and start it spinning, and then move the head to the right track and read the right sectors off the disk as it spun around beneath a tiny magnetic head. Instead, after I added the first chunk of memory to the card, I began running the entire system in the RAM drive, and it was insanely fast because it never had to hit the disk.

You had to be careful, though. I had to copy the contents of the RAM disk to one or more floppy disks before restarting the computer, because when power was interrupted, anything in its electronic memory would be lost forever. Still, it was worth it. Soon I had the equivalent of several disks worth of space to spread out around into. Most boards had two floppy drives, some had three or four, but I soon had nearly ten disks worth of unreasonably fast space. It was so fast, in fact, that people thought it was faked, that they were having a text file streamed to them, until they started interacting with it.

I promise this is going somewhere.

Some people told me that my system’s speed genuinely freaked them out, and that made me feel good. I began to get more users. The line started staying busy outside of work and school hours. As on most systems, users were limited to thirty minutes a day, though people more and more often rang the chat bell on my end, wanting to ask me some question or other, or just to catch up. With all that typing, I did more talking in those evening and weekend hours than I did in most of the rest of any given day, and by that point I had begun to get better at acting more normally chatty. It all came back to the acting, I think, in the end. When I was playing a role, I could stick to my lines and things very often came out okay. Typing, I could get out nearly anything and it didn’t seem to matter one way or another how I tried to say something, I never got stuck. It was as close to a pure expression of my thoughts that I could imagine.

There was always that moment, after you had gotten to know someone fairly well on a system, when it’s proposed that you meet up in real life. And at this meeting, if not a little bit before, maybe while talking on the phone, you shared your real names. My name was Patrick Dennis, because in a stage production four years earlier I had played a character named Patrick Dennis, and I knew who he was, and I knew my lines, and I could play his part. And luckily, my mother was relieved to know that I was not selling drugs, and she believed me when I explained how I was doing something with my computer that had inspired these people, mostly adults, to give me money. Not a ton of money, but slowly more and more. She saw the hand-colored maps of the fantasy game world that I had created, which I would mail off to those who had donated at least $10 so that they didn’t have to keep track of where everything was on their own, and so she believed me, even if she didn’t understand me. If she didn’t think it was an especially great use of time, to her credit she didn’t lecture me about it.

I installed another expansion card in my system, one that essentially replaced the Apple processor with one that was nearly four times as fast. After filling up all the memory sockets on the original memory expansion card, I expanded the card itself. I’ll say that again another way: They let you hang a memory expansion card from the memory expansion card. Soon I had filled that one, too, with what I had made, and I thanked the guys who wore brown ties with blue, short-sleeve shirts.

What I made was a game, basically, something that played a bit like Wizardry and a bit like Ultima III, but entirely text-based, fed to you one line at a time. After logging into the system you could read the message boards, check your email, browse the limited text file directory, ask to chat with the system operator, or you could play the game. Once in the game, you could not return to the rest of the board in the phone call. In the game, you were either exploring the terrain or you were walking through a city. In either of these places, you could fight things when they were there to be fought.

By exploring the terrain, you moved north, south, east, or west through different types of landscape, from deserts and ice and grasslands and forests, to hills, which meant you were coming close to some mountains, and mountains, which you couldn’t move through. There were a few secret paths that cut through some shallow mountain ranges, which might be more obvious if you bought a map, but in general you had to do a bit of walking around to get from place to place.

This really is going somewhere.

While exploring, you could randomly have an encounter with a kind of monster native to that terrain type. So, you might fight a polar bear if you were in an square on the map marked as being ice. The monster would be about as big and as tough as you were, so in your first random forest encounter you might find a goblin, but later on you might be surprised by a bugbear.

By walking through a city, you moved essentially from room to room, one stretch of street or hallway at a time. Each room had a paragraph’s description, and some rooms had people or monsters in them. I only ever completed one big city, and I never fully got it the way that I had it drawn out on the square meter of cardboard that I kept tucked behind my bed. Before my grand plans eventually hit a wall, though, the city you could explore had a decently large number of houses and avenues and markets and apartments — and people, their names all butcheries of characters I loved most from whatever I was reading at the time.

When you got killed, or your daily time limit ran out, my computer would drop the connection and you’d have to call back and start over. At first, yes, I didn’t keep your character once you died. It was easy to make a new one, though yes, eventually I saved people’s characters.

As you killed more things, your character became harder to kill, giving you access to and a chance at surviving an encounter with higher-level monsters. You also collected more and more powerful swords and armors, all of which I spent way too much time naming. I used to work on the lists and the names of the items over the long drives out to the country those Sundays when we went to visit my father’s parents.

Similarly, each bad guy, from a random bugbear in the forest to a giant worm in the desert to the evil priest at one of the temples in the city, had a custom “death” message. As with the weapons and the armor, I spent time making list after list of different messages — I got there while saving money for my modem, thinking how boring it would be to see the same “You killed a (monster’s name)” over and over again, and decided to show a special message for each monster. So to my table of monsters, which I’d written out in rows and columns to make sure that the less powerful monsters remained easier to kill than the more powerful monsters, I added a “death message” column and filled them in so that I wasn’t repeating myself.

I don’t now remember exactly when I first hit upon the completely insane idea, it was so long ago. However, I do clearly remember reflecting on that moment, a year or so afterwards, wondering if in my madness I hadn’t maybe pushed things more than a little bit too far.

I didn’t have that many monsters, really, but I had to have an equal number of different monsters for each terrain type, so that different levels of characters would always have something to fight wherever they were. And I wanted all the “You killed it!” messages to be different, though I felt like making the messages consistent somehow for monsters within any one type of terrain. At some point I must have run out of different ways to declare the death of a monster — like, by the time I got to deciding what to say about monsters killed in the hills, for example — and instead I started putting in phone numbers of less common but interesting underground hacker boards.

Clearly, it was unexpected for each monster to give up a different piece of information once slain, but I figured that I’d already done it so I guess I felt I had to keep doing it.

I mean, I know that there were a lot of people who didn’t realize — and I’ll make something up to give you an idea — that when you killed, for example, a bugbear, you got the number for a phone company test line, where two or more phone company employees could attempt to call into in order to troubleshoot network problems as a group, from different parts of the network. There were a bunch of these numbers, and hackers shared them, both locally and across area codes, we would hijack them as little chat rooms where we’d hang out for hours shooting the shit and maybe bragging a little and trading other interesting numbers. Then maybe when you killed a sandworm, you’d get the death cry of the creature followed by a username and password and phone number for some system.

People kept calling, more to explore the game than for any information they might have been getting out of it. Like I said, I don’t think most people knew what I was showing them. I kept it going for years, and I loved it, I loved every hour of it: the yawning sense of my social life outside of my electric community shutting down, then the weeks and even months that I would let the system run without hardly paying it any attention, and all the people I met and the dramas I ran through. It was a crazy time, but I made something for myself. Within a year of getting that first copy of bulletin board software I’d completely re-written it, and it was tight, and I’d written a game from scratch, and it wasn’t great and it was breaking a lot and I would go a while without updating the content because I had to get a job and do other things at some point — but eventually something happened and I outgrew it and I couldn’t stand it any more, and I was very relieved, somehow, that as myself, as Derek, my true name, I never had to say goodbye to any of those people. I’m sure they simply wondered whatever happened to Patrick.

I will have to write about them someday.

The week after I graduated from high school, my parents took me and my sister to Hawaii for a week. It was our first time off together as a family in years, and the day before I left I turned my computer off and I sat in my room and I listened to the tiny noises in the silence. I left it off the whole week we were gone, and when I got back I didn’t turn it back on. I plugged the phone in when I wanted to make a call, which wasn’t often, and otherwise I left it unplugged. That summer my parents moved houses, and I didn’t move my line with it. A few weeks later I went away to college to take my first real computer science classes and I never looked back.

Twelve years later, when my boss’s boss asked me if I was a hacker, I knew enough to deny it. But I couldn’t say what the truth was, not without stuttering — which I refused to do in front of other people, not anymore, not if I could help it. I knew my lines, I had them down. The stage had been set, the curtains drawn. I was ready, I thought.

I had no idea how little I still knew.

In my teenage years, the only thing more precious than a computer and a dedicated phone line was the amount of information you could afford to make available at any one time on a computer with a dedicated phone line. Even running some highly customized, super-trim code, the contents of a floppy disk could only hold so many conversations and isolated buckets of people’s emails and text files of questionable legality.

There was no way to send email from one system to another — that was madness at the time, though a couple of small systems eventually networked themselves together enough to offer some sharing, before the Internet as we now know it took off — so once your email was dropped by a system to make room for other things, it was dropped forever. You didn’t keep a copy of all your emails on your computer. You hardly had enough space for the things you absolutely needed in order for your computer to be useful to you in the first place, so you left all your email on the server, always. As a system operator, I felt worst when I had to delete someone’s email, even if it had been read. But I was building something, and I had to have priorities.

It was hard for me to say exactly what it was that I made. It was a game, definitely. But it was a peculiar kind of thing.

I called my mom on the phone tonight.

“I’ve really enjoyed reading all your posts,” she told me.

“Thanks so much for reading,” I said.

“I remember,” she said, “I don’t know if it’s true, but what I remember is that three times one day, while I was ironing, three people came by, and they had $20 for Patrick.”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, that happened.” That kind of thing happened more than once. “You know where the story is going.”

My mom and dad were normal parents, around as often as they were supposed to be, so I couldn’t always control whether or not they were home when some adult with whom I was at least passing friends would drop by with a donation toward the keeping the board up. Once I figured out the most straightforward and awesome way to get to where I wanted to go, I flat-out asked for money. Hey, man, if you like it around here, and you can spare anything, I’d totally appreciate it. And what do you know, I got money.

One time, it was red-haired woman, maybe in her early-30s, and she had two kids who were only a few years younger than I was. She gave me money and blinked back her surprise that I was who I said I was, alternating between gushing and being restrained about how much she liked the system. Her boys stood partly behind her, looking at me with a confusing sort of mistrust. God knows what she’d told them she thought I would be like.

And I’ll admit, it looked bad to a parent. Imagine this: You have a son named Derek. I don’t think I’m giving anything away by naming myself at this point. And every once in a while, sometimes a couple of people relatively close together — after normal work hours but before dinner time — would ring the doorbell or knock. The houses in our neighborhood were not especially close together, this being Texas and space being as widely available as it is, so this is not a random caller, but neither is it an expected knock. You answer the door, and a woman only a few years younger than you presses $20 into your hand, smiles, and says, “Tell Patrick it’s great stuff.” To a parent, it sounds pretty bad. I think the only thing that saved me was my complete obliviousness to how bad it sounded.

Like I said before, the Apple IIe had a bunch of card slots, and there was a good number of small companies who made a good living producing boards with different specialized components on them. One of them, Applied Engineering, was in the area, so their catalogs were floating around. One of the sysops for one of the other underground boards had made friends with a guy who worked there, and could get a good discount on their hardware. At half-off the retail price, I bought an expansion card that would let you add memory to it — not storage, like on a spinning disk, but all-electronic and highly volatile memory. The processor couldn’t address this memory directly, though. It had to go through the card slot to get to it, so it wasn’t quite as fast as the memory that came built in with the computer. But you could play a mean if effective trick on the computer by telling it to treat the card like a disk drive. The only snag was that, of course, the card didn’t come with any memory on it. You had to buy it, and it was expensive.

But it was an awesome plan because unlike with disk drives, you didn’t have to take up another card slot every time you wanted to add the equivalent of two more disks-worth of access. The memory expansion card could host the equivalent of 15 floppy disks, on the one card, with no moving parts. It wasn’t as expensive as a hard drive, which started at $700 for cheap crap and which was still far enough out of my league as to be an alien artifact kept in a private hanger by the Air Force somewhere. I had never even seen one with my own eyes, and I had come across a lot of computer equipment by that point in my life. The RAM disk was the way to go.

I kept mowing yards. I could add memory to my system’s expansion card by buying four chips at time and carefully plugging their tiny little delicate metal legs into the small sea of empty sockets on this massive expansion board. The chips came in plastic rails; uncap one end and chips would slide out. I could only ever afford four chips at a time — and it would cost me three weeks of lawn mowing. So for a while, every three or four weeks, I’d ask my mom to drop me off at the comic book store along the edge of the university, and after checking out what was new I would cross the street to buy another rail of chips from a small, bulk electronics parts vendor.

They used to look at me funny when I came into their office. I don’t think they got a lot of walk-in traffic. I used to think, “Come on — don’t look at me. You’re the nerds here.” But I think it was my age, and how excited I was about picking up my fourth rail of RAM that summer. Someone finally asked me what I was doing, 128 Kilobytes at a time, and knowing that I had never given them my name — though they knew me at the comic book story across the street; oh, shit — I began to tell them what I was doing and was quickly waved off as being insane. That kind of reaction was why I never talked about it, or about many things, really, so I shut up and I split because all I cared about was putting that new memory in the card and seeing what else I could do with it, and I couldn’t care less about a bunch of middle-aged dudes with bad, greasy hair who wore brown ties with blue short-sleeved shirts. You’re using an actual pocket-protector, for God’s sake. Why the hell was it so humiliating to be completely and utterly rejected by those people? Why did I not allow myself to feel validated when, on my next visit, one of them very quietly asked for the board’s number, and then thanked me with a quiet sincerity the next time I came in?

But I still haven’t told you what it was.

“True Names,” by Vernor Vinge, is one of the few things I can point to and say, “That thing there, it changed my life.” It was dressed up as science-fiction, though it could hardly have been more accurate in depicting the world as I saw it — or at least, as how I saw it was going to be.

In the old fairy tales and fantasy stories, knowing how to make magic was the most powerful thing you could do. You were a walking, talking plot-device, not just a game-changer but a world-changer. However, your success hinged on remaining untouchable. If someone knew your real name then they could control you.

In “True Names,” a group of hackers meet secretly in an online fantasy world, using fake names like Mr. Slippery, where they share information, raid computers, and do all the other things that hackers are classically thought to do. Our story begins with a guy getting busted by the cops, because they were able to trace him back to his online hacker identity. Eventually, of course, he comes to see that the cops are right, that one of his hacker buddies is a terribly bad guy who he has to help take down, but the story kicks off with him being forced to take their side because they know his true name, and they threaten to destroy him if he doesn’t do what they say. Not a great beginning to a partnership, but a great start for a story. I had a special fascination for a part of the story where something terrible had begun to grow in the unused spaces between systems, in this near future where tens of megabytes could go unused, unnoticed. These spaces had to be explored, because there was no way of knowing what you’d find there.

Having my inner life lain so bare gave my fantasies an external reality much more powerful than I could have built them up to be on my own. The expensive modem I wanted had begun to feel very far away. As “True Names” settled into a space in my mind, saving money for that modem acquired a life-threatening urgency. Dwelling deeply on what my eventual plans should be as I mowed our yard week after week, I could not shake the one thing about the story that angered me. It wasn’t that the hero turns on his hacker buddies and works with the Feds. It was the word that he has the hackers call themselves. The author calls them warlocks. I’m sure it was meant to echo back to the origin of the idea behind the power of “true names” in fantasy literature, but let’s be honest: it was stupid. It was an example of the problem I had even then with most fantasy and science-fiction. You don’t have to make up dorky words when there are perfectly good words that people use every day. I mean, come on. It grieved me to the point that I wanted to type in the whole damn thing, replacing “warlock” with the real words I knew, the true true-names.

Then as now, most of the people walking around in my world knew the word “hacker,” and they had some idea of what it meant, and they were wrong. There were four general groups of people in the digital underground at the time.

There were pirates, who largely limited their activity to copying software and helping spread it around. It was acknowledged that this was probably at least a little illegal, but no one had ever heard of anyone being arrested for it, outside of racketeering-scale piracy, more often counterfeiting schemes, specifically to make money. Real pirates, we all agreed, were not doing it for the money. Being a pirate also required the least amount of specialized knowledge and effort, so most people in the underground identified as pirates.

There were phreaks (pronounced “freaks,” sometimes called “phone phreaks” just to be clear, especially when talking out loud). Phreaks could do amazing things with phones, starting with free long-distance and growing more sophisticated until you were rerouting pizza delivery calls to your ex-girlfriend’s house on a Saturday night. Not that I ever did that, but that was the kind of thing that happened. We presumed that the phone company would be enraged about some of these things, but most of what we were doing wasn’t strictly illegal at the time. Still, after enraging your ex-girlfriend’s father with an inundation of Saturday night calls demanding pizza, you might not have thought of yourself as a criminal even if you were definitely an asshole.

Then there were crackers, the people who got up to the actual, undeniably illegal tricks. A pirate could help you copy a game, and could probably even figure out how to copy something that had been copy-protected in a way that he’d seen before, but it took a cracker to dedicate the long and tedious hours to figuring out how to defeat some new form of copy-protection. And more often than not, the focus and dedication and curiosity that made an expert copy-protection cracker would eventually get turned toward cracking any number of other kinds of systems — for, as they say, fun and profit.

The term “cracker” didn’t really catch on. I thought it was a little lame, myself, but from within the underground I could see the need to differentiate between a hacker in what we imagined to be the pure sense — someone smart and curious and interested in exploring for the love of knowing more — and someone driven by selfishness or even by malicious intent.

Whenever there was a news story about some hacker who’d broken into a system to change his grades, or who had been caught downloading documents from a corporate system, or something similar, it almost always kicked off a new round of underground indignation along the lines of, “You should call these people crackers, like safe-crackers, because they’re trying to break things, and not hackers, because it’s an insult to the hackers who just want to look around and have fun and don’t want to hurt anyone and aren’t in it for the money.”

The actual hackers — the real geniuses who weren’t malicious, or at least not very much, who were obsessed with learning more about the systems, who simply felt compelled to code all day and spend their spare time exploring connections, the spaces between the systems — seemed rare. But they were out there, a small but decent number of them.

Thirty years later, we talk about white-hat hackers and black-hat hackers in order to call out the difference in motivation and intent. But really, most of us knew that what separated the people we thought of as hackers from the people we dismissed as crackers was opportunity and perspective. Most hackers I knew were never actually given the opportunity to find out what they would do when faced with the chance to pilfer a corporate system. In the same way, most hackers I knew never allowed themselves to objectively consider how far they had in fact already gone in violating the privacy and the security of some systems and people. Most people seemed to be pretty cavalier about it.

Given the opportunity, though, I think a lot fewer people would have risked serious jail time through outrageous exploits than talked about it. From a more honest perspective, though, I think vastly fewer people would have been able to call themselves merely hackers. If you spent enough time on the scene, and you had even the slightest idea about and interest in what you were doing, eventually you were going to crack something.

Ideologically, I sympathized with the pirates, but I trained with phreaks, which relates to why I suffered without a modem for so long. Most modems back then used a super-cheap way of dialing a phone, pulse-dialing — imagine the simulation of an old rotary phone click-click-clicking around its actual dial in order to tell the phone switch what number it wanted to be connected with — because tone dialing, the sounds we still today associate with pressing numbers on a keypad, was very expensive to simulate. Computers back in the day could not generate arbitrary tones, not cleanly. Now, your phone can store and play back a sample of any kind of audio you’d ever want to play, spooled down at fantastic speed from a server who-knows-where, but when I was fifteen, if you wanted to dial a phone using touch-tones then you needed a modem with a special and expensive tone-generating chip. And the great thing about those was that once you can generate touch-tones, you can generate all kinds of tones.

The phone system back then was driven by tones. It lived and died by them. For example, you’ve probably heard how a guy who goes by the name of Cap’n Crunch — whose true name is John Draper — discovered that a whistle, included as a free toy in a brand of cereal marketed to children, produced a clean-enough 2600 Hertz tone to trick the old analog phone switches into thinking that a call had just ended, which left the whistler with an open line. Once you have an open line, you can call anyone, anywhere, for as long as you’d like to make the call, because the phone company won’t log it to your account. Then there were the tones that switches expected from pay phones when someone puts in a nickel. Fire the correct tone enough times, and you could make whatever call you wanted, since you’ve convinced the systems that you’ve paid for the privilege.

So if I saved my money for a more expensive modem, I would have touch-tone dialing, which was super fast relative to pulse-dialing and which made it much more likely that I’d be able to get through to some busier sites on busier nights while I let auto-dial do its dirty work. Plus, I’d be able to generate a number of interesting tones, starting with 2600 Hz and working my way up. And that way, I would only be ripping off the phone company. And no one likes the phone company, anyway. And since it’s not like I ever would have paid to make those calls in the first place, I reasoned, then it’s not like I’m robbing the phone company of anything. Fourteen-year-old boys can reason with a very specific flavor of self-serving precision.

What matters is that I will never forget a most joyful if painfully over-long bike ride to and from the only electronics store within many miles of my house in small, suburban Texas. It was just after Easter, I think.

I returned to the online world to find that a lot of my favorite numbers still worked, and a lot of people were glad to see me back. That was cool. There was no longer a computer answering the phone number for the Southern Baptist bulletin-board system. I never called it again.

On one of the first boards I connected back into after nearly a year’s absence, I requested to chat with the system operator. This was a common feature back then. The person calling in presses C from the main menu, and the remote system would beep, flashing a message that the user would like to chat, if the sysop was available. The sysop had been both nearby and interested in chatting, so we typed at each other for a while. I was quick on the keys, and expressed myself much better than any kid near my age, stutter aside. I told him I was interested in running a bulletin board system and asked if he could share a copy of the software for one with me.

“Just the source code,” I said — or typed, rather. “If you don’t mind. I want to run my own system. I want to see what the code looks like so I can write my own.”

He was of a pirate mind, and was happy to let me pull down a full copy. I could not believe my luck.

That night, I set up my system the way I wanted it to be. I got stuck thinking of a name, though, until it hit me. What should I call an underground site, hidden inside a boring chunk of hardware, though which my happiness bubbled out into the world? I posted an announcement, with my phone number, on three or four local sites — THE SUNSHINE FACTORY — and then I went to sleep.

The next morning, I saw to my delight that the system had been busy overnight. Then I realized to my horror that the system was down, hard down, wedged in a bad state, and all because I had done something exceedingly dumb. There had been enough callers overnight, and between the posts and their uploads they had completely filled the digital space on my one disk drive. It doesn’t feel like that long ago, but it was a time when you could basically type a computer to death. Now, I’ve seen people look like they were trying to fill their phones with text, but I don’t think anyone’s ever succeeded.

I reached back out to the guy who’d given me the software.

“You gotta set limits on things,” he said. “You can’t just let people post any old thing, either. You gotta delete stuff. It takes time.”

Then I told him I only had one floppy drive.

“That’s your problem,” he said.

“Do you have anything smaller?” I asked. “If the code was smaller, maybe there’d be more space on the disk for other stuff.” An Apple II disk could hold nearly 19,000 words. That wasn’t a lot. When I’m on a roll, I write about 1,000 words an hour. A lot of the code that ran the bulletin-board system was embarrassingly straightforward, though big chunks of it made zero sense. I had now idea how much of it was absolutely necessary versus what I could happily delete in order to make room for another small list or two of interesting numbers.

He didn’t have anything smaller. I had to aggressively remove posts and completely restrict file uploads. People were happy to download without contributing, but the gears of the Sunshine Factory were grinding. I was failing before I’d even begun. I hadn’t set out to host a popular pirate site, offering up the hottest new games, because I didn’t want to serve users who would only connect so that they could kick off a download. I wanted to talk to people.

Something else would have to be done. I called another board that I’d been on for a while, chatted with the sysop. He also agreed that my problem was the storage, not the size of the software. We typed back and forth at each other for a little while, until he told me to call back with an actual phone to have an actual conversation.

I asked if he’d mind giving me a copy of what he was running, just a piece of it so that I could see how it worked. I told him I didn’t want to rip anybody off. “Why don’t I give you a copy of the whole thing?” he asked. He was going to be in my area that weekend. He said he’d stop by.

He ended up being a man in his mid-30s, red hair, mustache — the first person I ever met in person only after coming to know them online. I’m not sure what he was expecting but from his expression when a whisper-thin fifteen-year-old boy answered the door, I was not what he was expecting. He took it well, though.

“Come on back to my room,” I said. He stepped in, nervous, looking around for adult supervision. My parents were out.

In a black nylon satchel, he’d brought a spare disk drive and the cables it needed to hook up to my computer. Soon we were reading his bulletin-board software from one drive and copying to a blank disk in the other, while he thumbed through my small library of pirated software. He wasn’t interested in games, which cut out most of what I had. Evidently I had a sector editor he hadn’t seen, though, and he asked if he could copy it. I was totally surprised he hadn’t seen it, since it had been so useful to me.

Earlier that year I’d fought my way through a game called Ultima III, and once I got to the same point with it that I’d gotten to with Wizardry where it felt less interesting and more of a grind, I’d started wondering how the game remembered my progress. A sector editor was a tool I’d been told was used mostly by crackers to read and modify information on a disk at its lowest level. It usually looked like garbage, though sometimes you could find interesting things by scanning through screen after screen of the actual bytes on a disk. Scanning my copy of Ultima III eventually turned up where it was storing my game character, and through methodical experimentation I figured out what all the funny letters meant — this one told the computer how strong I was, this one was how hard I was to kill, and so on. I gave myself greater and more incredible powers until I sailed straight through the game’s finale, devastating it. Even weeks later, I kept tweaking my character, going back to stomp things that had previously been serious challenges for me in the game.

“It sounds like you’re trying to do something here,” he said. “What are you trying to do?”

I felt pierced. I wasn’t prepared to talk about what I’d been planning, especially not with a grown-up.

“Have you ever read a story called ‘True Names’?” I asked, stuttering badly.

He had not. Using as few words as I could, I told him what I was going to build.

He clearly wanted to finish my words for me, as most adults would when my stutter was at its worst. It was a relief to find him interested in what I had to say and patient enough to let me say it myself. It was a real kindness, and was probably one of the reasons we became something like friends, eventually.

When I was through telling him what I planned, he stared off into the distance, nodding to himself. Then he looked back at me and said, “That is completely bat-shit crazy. My name’s Frank, by the way.” We only knew one another by our online name.

“Patrick,” I told him, pointing at myself, because I was not about to give anyone my true name. I had a lot of work to do.