Many of the BBSs you encounter will be strictly legit operations. There will be no talk of hacking, no trading of break-in secrets, and certainly no sensitive information of any kind being distributed to newcomers. You will have to start by jumping into already established, possibly ho-hum conversations.
Be polite, try to be helpful. Add thoughtful comments to the discussion. Having an experi-enced hacker as a friend will do more to boost your skill in that area than anything else - except per-haps some persistence, research and luck. Soon you will have a few favorite systems that you'll call on a regular basis, but you
should also be constantly branching out, trying all the new sys-tems you find, your goal being to eventually find an access into the "computer underground."
There is no single, organized underground per se, but there are groups of hackers and others inter-ested in technology scattered here and there. They will keep their conversations of illegal activity se-cret, so it will be difficult to find them. The message boards they use to communicate will often remain hidden to the uninitiated, and the BBSs on which the most interesting tales are traded will not have their phone numbers publicized at all. Your best bet is to keep searching. If you start to get the feel-ing that someone on one of the bulletin boards may be inclined to deviant computing, you may want to send him or her a private message (tactfully) asking if he or she is interested in that sort of thing and if so, would that person want to trade information? But remember: any message you send on a BBS can be read by the sysop, co-sysops, and possibly other system managers lower down the hierarchy, so be discreet if the people who run the show are antihacker.
A lot of people own computers with modems, and you will run into a lot of different kinds of people on electronic bulletin boards. If you look in the right places you are sure to find computer hackers. What may be more difficult is getting them to accept you as one of their own. Hackers like to show off, but they don't usually like to ex-plain how they do their tricks. You will have to demonstrate to them that you are a thoughtful, re-sourceful, logical person who can hack just as good as they can - and one who has information to share. As you wander through the bulletin board for-est, keep track of where you've been. Keep a list of the different BBSs, making note of the software used to run each BBS, and what features are avail-able on each one. Particular features to keep track of are file transfer capability, extent of BBS list, user lists, and doors.
