The people in Holland are very active, but somehow the Dutch hackers don't quite qualify as "heavy." Probably because computer-hacking is legal in Holland, and therefore nobody ever gets busted for it. The Dutch lack the proper bad attitude, somehow.

America 's answer to the Dutch menace began arriving in a steady confusion of airport shuttle buses and college-kid decaying junkers. A software pirate, one of the more prosperous attendees, flaunted a radar-detecting black muscle-car. In some dim era before the jet age, this section of St Louis had been a mellow, fertile Samuel Clemens landscape. Waist-high summer weeds still flourished beside the four-lane highway and the airport feeder roads.

The graceless CyberView hotel had been slammed down onto this landscape as if dropped from a B-52. A small office-tower loomed in one corner beside a large parking garage. The rest was a rambling mess of long, narrow, dimly lit corridors, with a small swimming pool, a glass-fronted souvenir shop and a cheerless dining room. The hotel was clean enough, and the staff, despite provocation, proved adept at minding their own business. For their part, the hackers seemed quite fond of the place.

The term "hacker" has had a spotted history. Real "hackers," traditional "hackers," like to write software programs. They like to "grind code," plunging into its densest abstractions until the world outside the computer terminal bleaches away. Hackers tend to be portly white techies with thick fuzzy beards who talk entirely in jargon, stare into space a lot, and laugh briefly for no apparent reason. The CyberView crowd, though they call themselves "hackers," are better identified as computer intruders. They don't look, talk or act like 60s M.I.T.-style hackers.