Contents
About this project
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Postscript, March 1997
Postscript, January 2000

As a 7th grader at a Manhattan public school — he won't say which one — he considers himself a loner, trusting few people his own age. His best friends tend to be several years older than he, and they are all hackers.

Last semester he failed his math class. Yet in his spare time he reads about research into fuzzy logic — a field involving some of the most complex mathematical equations in world — and the development of artificially intelligent computers. "It's not that I wanted to fail math. I just didn't like the way it was taught," he said.

One day he would like to go to a good college, but he'd also like to quit school now.

"I realized early on that it's just a matter of jumping through all the hoops. It's all mindless busywork. I could go get a GED right now if I were 14, but I won't because I want to go to a good college, and no good school will take you with a GED."

Vandal says he wrote his first computer program when he was seven years old. Using an IBM-clone 286 computer running Q-Basic, he keyed in a program that would ask for the user's name. Type in his name and the computer would respond "Hello, how nice to see you again." Type in any other name, and the computer would respond with a mere "Hello."

By the age of nine he had discovered the Internet. One of his two older brothers had an account with Panix, New York's first private Internet Service Provider. By then he had graduated to using a Macintosh IIci that the brother had received as a Bar Mitzvah gift. It came with a 2,400-baud modem.

"I just found it was much easier to live on the Internet than in the real world," he said.

A glance at Gopherspace

He tried everything he could. He explored the world of Gopher space, an important, but nearly-forgotten text-only precursor to the World Wide Web that was popular with universities and publications experimenting with online publishing in the early 1990s. He sampled Usenet newsgroups, but found the strong opinions expressed by people posting to the groups annoyed him.

He found his true online home on the channels of IRC — Internet Relay Chat — the real-time chat rooms of cyberspace. Like a corner tavern each channel has its own set of regulars who share a common interest, and neophytes who are just learning the ropes. Vandal's favorite channel was #hack, where he spent most of his time simply paying attention to other people's conversations, a practice known as lurking, and learning. During the chats, he heard about 2600, which he started reading at about age 10. By the time he was 11 he was attending the meetings at the Citicorp Center.

"It made sense to me," he says. "It spoke my language. When I went to my first meeting, it was like I finally found people who were like me."

At that first meeting, an older hacker refused to take Vandal seriously. He talked down to the boy, seeing only the small body, not the mind of a potential equal. "I spent a weekend getting all the information I could on him," Vandal says. "Then I called him and read him his Social Security number, his father's name and occupation, his school address, his mother's maiden name, and the fact that his father had a criminal record. Then I told him who I was. Some people underestimate me," he said.

For a few months in 1996, Vandal attended a Manhattan private school with a strong reputation for its use of computers. But the new school turned out to be a nightmare. As the new boy in school, a small, weird one at that, the boys in his grade apparently decided that Vandal would be their new punching bag.