It was only a 75 cent deficit, but Clifford Stoll knew it was important that he figure out its origin. Stoll was on his second day on the job. He had just been hired as computer systems manager at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, a research facility for astrophysicists in Berkeley, California, and his first assignment was to discover why the computer's books didn't balance for the previous month.

LRB 19 April 1990 | PDF Download