ic; some of these games are quite good.) He bugs his parents for a
modem, or quite often, uses his parents' modem.

The world of boards suddenly opens up. Computer games can be quite
expensive, real budget-breakers for a kid, but pirated games, stripped
of copy protection, are cheap or free. They are also illegal, but it
is very rare, almost unheard of, for a small-scale software pirate to
be prosecuted. Once "cracked" of its copy protection, the program,
being digital data, becomes infinitely reproducible. Even the
instructions to the game, any manuals that accompany it, can be
reproduced as text files, or photocopied from legitimate sets. Other
users on boards can give many useful hints in game-playing tactics.
And a youngster with an infinite supply of free computer games can
certainly cut quite a swath among his modem-less friends.

And boards are pseudonymous. No one need know that you're fourteen
years old--with a little practice at subterfuge, you can talk to adults
about adult things, and be accepted and taken seriously! You can even
pretend to be a girl, or an old man, or anybody you can imagine. If
you find this kind of deception gratifying, there is ample opportunity
to hone your ability on boards.

But local boards can grow stale. And almost every board maintains a
list of phone-numbers to other boards, some in distant, tempting,
exotic locales. Who knows what they're up to, in Oregon or Alaska or
Florida or California? It's very easy to find out--just order the
modem to call through its software--nothing to this, just typing on a
keyboard, the same thing you would do for most any computer game. The
machine reacts swiftly and in a few seconds you are talking to a bunch
of interesting people on another seaboard.

And yet the BILLS for this trivial action can be staggering! Just by
going tippety-tap with your fingers, you may have saddled your parents
with four hundred bucks in long-distance charges, and gotten chewed out
but good. That hardly seems fair.

How horrifying to have made friends in another state and to be deprived
of their company--and their software--just because telephone companies
demand absurd amounts of money! How painful, to be restricted to
boards in one's own AREA CODE--what the heck is an "area code" anyway,
and what makes it so special? A few grumbles, complaints, and innocent
questions of this sort will often elicit a sympathetic reply from
another board user--some