In the early days you could find him picking up old computers that people abd businesses had put out as trash. Sort of like how L0pht Heavy Industries got started. He tear them down for parts to expand the couple of systems he'd gotten running. He ran Linux back when you had to compile it yourself, not to mention practically any application you wanted to install (like nmap, nc, and other goodies).

Even though he strung together a broadcast Ethernet network in his "lab" (aka his desk), he spent lots of time outside or in not often traveled spots experimenting, testing, and futzing on his portable attacking 127.0.0.1.

Tech books were a bit expensive, and there were not many magazines, except 2600, that were actually informative, so be became a lurker on usenet and other forums. If you could not afford a book, chat with people who had actually read it.

Having played guitar for several years, typing came fast and easy.

After that, things just fell into place, understanding that "fell" means lots of reading, studying, experimenting, speculating late into the night. And don't forget the gallons of life sustaining coffee and Mountain Dew!

But finally, without expecting it, and groups of full-time professional "security analysts" (by day and leet hackers by night), after having spent a couple week working on a "project" toghther, took him to lunch and made a big deal of pronouncing him a hacker! At last, he had found his people.

Being a hacker is not something you learn. It us something that other hackers recognize in you. It is a collection of attitudes, endless driving interests, making music a key part of your life, and being driven to figure out how to make systems do things the developers never intended or imagined.

He is not a criminal. He is not out of control. If he happened upon a network that was open to exploitation, he would write up instructions for fixing it and have them conveniently emailed from Jonny Quest, who by the way is one of the most underrated actors of his time.

TPP is happy to share his knowledge with anyone who will not abuse its power. In fact, he often shares his written instructions, explainations, and endless ideas, albeit with a reasonable dose of kitty repellent.

You see there are three levels of hacker. At the top are the "leet", short for elite. These incredibly gifted folks discover the unimaginable situations that can be misused, and then develop tool to identify and then fix them.

Next are the hacker rank and file. They make up the majority if the community.

Finally at the bottom you find the "script kiddy", also known as "anchel bitters". These are like the kids who manage to get into Dad's gun cabinet. They do not understand how a firearm works, and don't care. They understand pulling the trigger, but have not adequately considered the consiquence, nor do they have a valid reason for pulling a trigger. But given the opportunity they will.

That brings us back to "kiddy repellent". It is intentionally including errors, misspellings, or leaving out a critical step when sharing information and instructions for things that could be used inappropriately. The idea is to restrict potentially dangerous things out of the hands of script kiddos since you have to be sufisticated enough to correct the errors and fill in the blanks to get the t hing to work.