Tom Edison and Cheshire Catalyst, two phone phreaks who had been interested in the nether side of technology for ages, took over TAP in the late 70s. The journal came to an end before its time in 1983 when Torn Edison's New Jersey condominium burned to the ground, the victim of a professional burglary and an
amateurish arson. The burglars had gotten all of Tom's computer equipment, the stuff from which TAP was born. The arson, perhaps an attempt to cover the burglary, did not succeed. It was a sloppy fire, one which Tom and Cheshire hypothesized had been engineered by some irate phone company officer. A few months later, the original TAP printed its final issue. The following year, in 1984, hacker Eric Corley (aka Emmanuel Goldstein) filled the void with a new publication: 2600 Magazine. Ironically, Goldstein is more a rhetorician than a hacker, and the magazine is less technical and more political (like the original YIPL).
Networks were being formed all over, enabling hackers to not only hack more sites but to exchange information among themselves quicker and more easily. Mo needs published magazines? The City University of New York and Yale University joined together as the first BITNET (Because It's Time NETwork) link in May 1981. Now there are net-works of networks (such as Internet) connecting the globe, putting all hackers and common folk in di-rect communication with one another.
