Supporting documents are here. The LA Times article linked above and the Newsweek article talk about a friend of Anderson, a hacker named Bill Landreth, a published author for Microsoft Press on computer security issues. At Bill’s suggestion Anderson spoke with a literary agent and published books about computer security as well (we are trying to track them down).

Landreth was living with Anderson’s family and disappeared in September 1986 after leaving a suicide note. We haven’t been able to determine Landreth’s fate, although based on this article from 1991 he or someone with his name became a government agent investigating security crimes.

Frankly, my opinion of Tom Anderson just rose significantly. This was pretty hard core stuff in the 80s. Twenty years later he would go on to cofound what would become the largest site on the Internet.nullnull