The Cuckoos Egg: Cliffs Persistence

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Term Paper Title	The Cuckoos Egg: Cliffs Persistence
# of Words	1835
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	7.34

The Cuckoo's Egg: Cliff's Persistence

The Cuckoo's Egg: Cliff's Persistence

By Clifford Stoll

"The Cuckoo's Egg" is a story of persistence, love for one's work and is just
plain funny!  The story starts out with Clifford Stoll being "recycled" to a
computer analyst/webmaster.

Cliff, as he is affectionately called, is a long-haired ex-hippie that works at
Lawrence Berkeley Lab.  He originally was an astronomer, but since his grant
wore out, he became a mainframe master.  He was glad that instead of throwing
him out into the unemployment office, the Lab recycled their people and
downstairs he went, to the computer lab.

A few days after he becomes the master of the mainframe, his colleague, Wayne
Graves, asks him to figure out a 75cent glitch that is in the accounting system.
It turns out that a computer guru, "Seventek" seems to be in town.  None of his
closest friends know that.  The Lab becomes suspicious that it might be a hacker.

To fill you in who Seventek is, he is a computer guru that created a number of
programs for the Berkeley UNIX system.  At the time, he was in England far from
computers and civilization.  The crew does not what to believe that it would be
Seventek, so they start to look what the impostor is doing.  Cliff hooks up a
few computers to the line that comes from the Tymnet.  Tymnet is a series of
fiber-optic cables that run from a major city to another major city.  So if you
were in LA and wanted to hook up to a computer in the Big Apple you could call
long distance, have a lot of interference from other callers and have a slow
connection, or you could sign-up to Tymnet and dial locally, hop onthe optic
cable and cruise at a T-3 line.  The lab had only five Tymnet lines so Cliff
could easily monitor every one with five computers, teletypes, and five printers.

That was the difficult part, where to get all that equipment.  At graduate
school they taught Cliff to improvise.  It was a Friday, and not many people
come to work on Saturday.  Since it was easier to make up an excuse than to beg
for anything, he "borrowed" everything he needed.  Then programmed his computer
to beep twice when someone logged on from the Tymnet lines.  The thing is, since
he was sleeping under his desk, he would gouge his head on the desk drawer.
Also, many people like to check their E-mail very late at night, so not to get
interference. Because of that his terminal beeped a lot!  The next day, he was
woken up by the cable operator.  Cliff said that he m...

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