[ISN] Lunching habit takes hacker to academia

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/023/1050023/lunching-habit-takes-hacker-to-academia

By Wendy M. Grossman
The Inquirer
14 December 2008

IT'S ABOUT 20 years since a how-to computer book called The Hacker's 
Handbook hit the bookstores. At the time, everyone knew that the author, 
Hugo Cornwall, was a skinny teen with a bad complexion and worse social 
skills who lived in a bedsit filled with half-empty pizza boxes. The 
journalist from the Sunday Times who went to meet him was sure of it.

And instead she found...a somewhat older guy living in a moderately 
prosperous middle-class house full of books. His real name: Peter 
Sommer.

The key moments in Sommer's career all seem to have come over lunch. It 
was at a lunch that he became Hugo Cornwall. At another, having just 
completed a law degree at Oxford, he instead launched a career as a 
publisher. Over a third, Ian Angell signed him up to teach in the 
information systems integrity group at the London School of Economics.

"It hasn't been complete drift," he says. "I've always made choices."

Sommer got interested very early in the bulletin board systems of the 
1980s, the kind of thing that ran off a Commodore Pet over dial-up.

[...]


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