different time, different net, still the same, somehow

... a bespectacled 16-year-old who calls himself Marc communicates with several hundred unauthorized "tourists" on a computer magic carpet called ARPANET. This $3.3 million computer network maintained by the Defense Department provides a link between key contractors, but ARPANET has become a pen pal club, dating service and electronic magazine for youngsters and other computer hitchhikers gifted enough to join what is in effect a huge, electronic message service. In fact, TIME Correspondent Michael Moritz, working on a terminal near San Francisco, interviewed a teenage tourist in San Diego, using the ARPANET network. Marc's access to ARPANET is as easy as pi. He dials the number of a local military-base computer, provided by a friend who works there, plugs his receiver into a $125 modem (a telephone computer hookup), and tapes out a password on his $685 home terminal | time, 1982