I have decided that I was in error to allow others to influence my online activity, going back to how I have done it for years, using the past to highlight the present. Just think these are the hackers of the 80's and 90's. I believe the hackers have only gotten better.

..o..

Prime Suspect rang Mendax, offering an adventure. He had discovered a strange system called NMELH1 (pronounced N-Melly-H-1) and it was time to go exploring. He read off the dial-up numbers, found in a list of modem phone numbers on another hacked system.

Mendax looked at the scrap of paper in his hand, thinking about the name of the computer system.

The ‘N’ stood for Northern Telecom, a Canadian company with annual sales of $8 billion. NorTel, as the company was known, sold thousands of highly sophisticated switches and other telephone exchange equipment to some of the world’s largest phone companies. The ‘Melly’ undoubtedly referred to the fact that the system was in Melbourne. As for the ‘H-1’, well, that was anyone’s guess, but Mendax figured it probably stood for ‘host-1’--meaning computer site number one.

Prime Suspect had stirred Mendax’s interest. Mendax had spent hours experimenting with commands inside the computers which controlled telephone exchanges. In the end, those forays were all just guesswork--trial and error learning, at considerable risk of discovery. Unlike making a mistake inside a single computer, mis-guessing a command inside a telephone exchange in downtown Sydney or Melbourne could take down a whole prefix--10000 or more phone lines--and cause instant havoc.

This was exactly what the International Subversives didn’t want to do. The three IS hackers--Mendax, Prime Suspect and Trax--had seen what happened to the visible members of the computer underground in England and in Australia. The IS hackers had three very good reasons to keep their activities quiet.

Phoenix. Nom. And Electron.

full text here

https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2023/01/part-6-underground-by-suelette-dreyfus.html