run only on
mainframe machines, owned by large groups of suit-and-tie
professionals, rather than on bedroom machines where people can get up
to easy mischief.

And AT&T UNIX source code is serious high-level programming. The
number of skilled UNIX programmers with any actual motive to swipe UNIX
source code is small. It's tiny, compared to the tens of thousands
prepared to rip-off, say, entertaining PC games like "Leisure Suit
Larry."

But by 1989, the warez-d00d underground, in the persons of Terminus and
his friends, was gnawing at AT&T UNIX. And the property in question
was not sold for twenty bucks over the counter at the local branch of
Babbage's or Egghead's; this was massive, sophisticated, multi-line,
multi-author corporate code worth tens of thousands of dollars.

It must be recognized at this point that Terminus's purported ring of
UNIX software pirates had not actually made any money from their
suspected crimes. The $300,000 dollar figure bandied about for the
contents of Terminus's computer did not mean that Terminus was in
actual illicit possession of three hundred thousand of AT&T's dollars.
Terminus was shipping software back and forth, privately, person to
person, for free. He was not making a commercial business of piracy.
He hadn't asked for money; he didn't take money. He lived quite
modestly.

AT&T employees--as well as freelance UNIX consultants, like
Terminus--commonly worked with "proprietary" AT&T software, both in the
office and at home on their private machines. AT&T rarely sent
security officers out to comb the hard disks of its consultants. Cheap
freelance UNIX contractors were quite useful to AT&T; they didn't have
health insurance or retirement programs, much less union membership in
the Communication Workers of America. They were humble digital
drudges, wandering with mop and bucket through the Great Technological
Temple of AT&T; but when the Secret Service arrived at their homes, it
seemed they were eating with company silverware and sleeping on company
sheets! Outrageously, they behaved as if the things they worked with
every day belonged to them!

And these were no mere hacker teenagers with their hands full of
trash-paper and their noses pressed to the corporate windowpane. These
guys were UNIX wizards, not only carrying AT&T data in their machines
and their heads, but eagerly networking about it, over machines that
were far more powerful than anything previously im