Burning Chrome by William Gibson

 

 

This story was written by William Ford Gibson and was first published in Omni in 1982. It tells the story of two hackers who hack systems for profit. The two main characters are Bobby Quine who specializes in software and Automatic Jack who is more into hardware. Automatic Jack comes across a piece of Russian hacking software that is very sophisticated and hard to trace. A third character in the story is Rikki, a girl who Bobby becomes infatuated with and for whom he wants to hit it big. The rest of the story unfolds with Bobby deciding to break into the system of a notorious hacker called Chrome, who handles money transfers for organized crime, and Automatic Jack reluctantly agreeing to help him. One line from this story — "...the street finds its own uses for things" — has become a widely-quoted aphorism for describing the sometimes unexpected uses to which users can put technologies (for example, hip-hop DJs' reinvention of the turntable, which changed it from a medium of reproduction into one of production).

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