nodes, with instant global access for the best and
brightest, would be a perfect milieu for the shoestring attic
capitalism that made Mitch Kapor what he is today.

Kapor is a very bright man. He has a rare combination of visionary
intensity with a strong practical streak. The Board of the EFF: John
Barlow, Jerry Berman of the ACLU, Stewart Brand, John Gilmore, Steve
Wozniak, and Esther Dyson, the doyenne of East-West computer
entrepreneurism--share his gift, his vision, and his formidable
networking talents. They are people of the 1960s, winnowed-out by its
turbulence and rewarded with wealth and influence. They are some of
the best and the brightest that the electronic community has to offer.
But can they do it, in the real world? Or are they only dreaming?
They are so few. And there is so much against them.

I leave Kapor and his networking employees struggling cheerfully with
the promising intricacies of their newly installed Macintosh System 7
software. The next day is Saturday. EFF is closed. I pay a few
visits to points of interest downtown.

One of them is the birthplace of the telephone.

It's marked by a bronze plaque in a plinth of black-and-white speckled
granite. It sits in the plaza of the John F. Kennedy Federal Building,
the very place where Kapor was once fingerprinted by the FBI.

The plaque has a bas-relief picture of Bell's original telephone.
"BIRTHPLACE OF THE TELEPHONE," it reads. "Here, on June 2, 1875,
Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A. Watson first transmitted sound over
wires.

"This successful experiment was completed in a fifth floor garret at
what was then 109 Court Street and marked the beginning of world-wide
telephone service."

109 Court Street is long gone. Within sight of Bell's plaque, across a
street, is one of the central offices of NYNEX, the local Bell RBOC,
on 6 Bowdoin Square.

I cross the street and circle the telco building, slowly, hands in my
jacket pockets. It's a bright, windy, New England autumn day. The
central office is a handsome 1940s-era megalith in late Art Deco, eight
stories high.

Parked outside the back is a power-generation truck. The generator
strikes me as rather anomalous. Don't they already have their own
generators in this eight-story monster? Then the suspicion strikes me
that NYNEX must have heard of the September 17 AT&T power-outage which
crashed New York City. Belt-and-suspenders, this generator. Very
telco.

Over