The Story of the 414s: The Milwaukee Teenagers Who Became Hacking Pioneers

This story appeared in the November 2020 issue as "Cracking the 414s." In the 1983 techno-thriller WarGames, David Lightman, played by a fresh-faced Matthew Broderick, sits in his bedroom, plunking away on a boxy computer using an 8-bit Intel processor. As text flashes across the screen, David's face lights up; he believes he's hacking into a video game company, but the unwitting teenager is actually facing off against a military supercomputer. "Shall we play a game?" the computer asks ominously. In the film, the subsequent showdown triggers a countdown to World War III.