The Cuckoo's Egg

by Cliff Stoll

In the days when the presence of a computer did NOT presume the presence of a network (they used to be freestanding units that could not easily communicate with another system), accounts to use the computer were expensive to maintain and heavily scrutinized by management. When the Accounting staff of Stoll's university employer discovered 75 cents' worth of time used with which no user was associated, they called him and demanded that he locate the "phantom" user. Stoll wasn't even a computing