Book Review: The Computer Underground

Reviewed by John Drake

The Computer Underground by M. Harry, Loompanics Unlimited

The Computer Underground appears to be an excuse to publish text files.  The book runs a long 257 pages of computer printout.

It is divided up into what M. Harry has written and what he has downloaded off a BBS.  This is about a one to twenty ratio.  It's also unfortunate that nearly everybody who writes about hacking spends so much time dwelling on the obvious - "This is a modem...  There are 8 bits...  You connect it to a phone line..."  Even Out of the Inner Circle by Bill Landreth falls into this trap.  There is nothing in Harry's writings that any self-respecting hacker/phone phreak doesn't already know.

I was hoping for real research like extensively tracing the beginning of phone phreaking through Captain Crunch, Abbie Hoffman, and TAP to the present, with some interesting interviews with hackers and phreakers.  The only thing he seems to have actually done was to poll people through a BBS.  His analysis of the results are also pretty obvious to anybody involved.  He then proceeds to plot out the old flow chart of a searching and hacking program.

The rest of the 257 pages are printouts of text files.  Harry seems to have a preoccupation with ARPANET and lists of dial ports.  There is an abundance of blank space, particularly when a section ends at the top of a page.  A few of the text files are typeset and nicely placed in the center of the page.  The rest of The Computer Underground is mere printout, not even in double-emphasize mode.  This is clearly not one of Loompanics' better releases.