Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Vs from Gimlett Media.

This is the show that pits facts against floppy disks, against federal crimes, against computer

fraud, about files, like computer files, about FBI files.

Please stop, just stop now.

Alright, do you introduce yourself?

Okay, okay, hi, my name's Joel Werner and I make a podcast called Some of All Parts.

Joel is a science journalist from Australia, he's also a great friend of mine.

And the reason that Joel is here today is because he's been working on this crazy story about the earliest days of hacking.

And by the way, our story has a few naughty words.

This is a story that's sort of from the dark ages of the internet.

And the tale we're going to tell you is about an underground group of nerds who cobbled together their computers from like bits of gear they found in the trash.

And yet, they became some of the most infamous hackers of their day, creating one of the world's first international hacking scandals.

But our story, it starts with a different set of nerds.

Nerds that had a ton of fancy high tech equipment, the best in the world.

NASA.

To set it up a bit, this is October 1989.

And NASA's getting ready to launch Galileo, which is the first spacecraft to ever orbit Jupiter.

We have a goal for auto-sequence start at Lina's core redundant computers have.

It was this huge project, but it had also gotten to be really controversial.

Good afternoon. At Cape Canaveral, they are goal for launch of the Space Shuttle Atlantis.

The launch of the Galileo Space Pro wasn't supposed to be controversial.

The shuttle landed five astronauts will deploy Galileo, an unmanned space vehicle that will fly to Jupiter.

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