Regards, Craig
The `other' people were, of course, the IS hackers. There is nothing like reading about your own hacking antics in some one's security mail.
Mendax and Prime Suspect frequently visited ANU's computers to read the security mail there. However, universities were usually nothing special, just jumping-off points and, occasionally, good sources of information on how close the AFP were to closing in on the IS hackers.
Far more interesting to Mendax were his initial forays into Telecom's exchanges. Using a modem number Prime Suspect had found, he dialled into what he suspected was Telecom's Lonsdale Exchange in downtown Melbourne. When his modem connected to another one, all he saw was a blank screen. He tried a few basic commands which might give him help to understand the system:
Login. List. Attach.
The exchange's computer remained silent.
Mendax ran a program he had written to fire off every recognised keyboard character—256 of them—at another machine. Nothing again. He then tried the break signal—the Amiga key and the character B pressed simultaneously. That got an answer of sorts.
:
He pulled up another of his hacking tools, a program which dumped 200 common commands to the other machine. Nothing. Finally, he tried typing `logout'. That gave him an answer:
error, not logged on