The Phine Art of Phone Phreaking: A Story of Telephones, Computers and the American Way

Eddie Rivera’s 1980 cover story examines the Southern California phone-phreaking community at a time when telephone experimentation and early computer hacking were beginning to overlap. Rivera profiles Lewis De Payne under the alias “Rosco” and describes him as the operator of the HOBO-UFO conference line.

The article portrays De Payne as a technically knowledgeable and well-connected figure who collected telephone-system information and served as a resource within the Los Angeles phreaking scene. It is an important contemporary source on the community in which Kevin Mitnick and other early hackers developed.