2 Pad
Guest 0 was Electron. He usually logged on as Guest, partly because he was so paranoid about being busted and because he believed operators monitored his connections if they knew it was Electron logging in. They seemed to take great joy in sniffing the password to his own account on Altos. Then, when he had logged off, they logged in and changed his password so he couldn't get back under the name Electron. Nothing was more annoying. Phoenix typed, `Hey, Pad. How's it going?'
Pad wrote back, `Feeny! Heya.'
`Do you and Gand still have that encrypted copy of Deszip we gave you a few months ago?'
`Encrypted copy … hmm. Thinking.' Pad paused. He and Gandalf hacked dozens of computer systems regularly. Sometimes it was difficult to recall just where they had stored things.
`Yeah, I know what you mean. I don't know. It was on a system on JANET,' Pad said. Britain's Joint Academic Network was the equivalent of Australia's AARNET, an early Internet based largely on a backbone of universities and research centres.
`I can't remember which system it was on,' Pad continued.
If the Brits couldn't recall the institution, let alone the machine where they had hidden Deszip, it was time to give up all hope. JANET comprised hundreds, maybe thousands, of machines. It was far too big a place to randomly hunt around for a file which Gandalf would no doubt have tried to disguise in the first place.
`But the file was encrypted, and you didn't have the password,' Pad wrote. `How come you want it?'
`Because we found the password. <smile>' That was the etiquette on Altos. If you wanted to suggest an action, you put it in < >.