Bioc Agent's Guide to Telecommunications

... In an era mostly dominated by illiterate, half-baked attempts to learn more about the telephone networks and electronics at large, Bioc Agent 003 rose like a giant over the fledging 80's "phreaking" scene. Instead of just writing small treatises and paragraphs about individual discoveries or collected information, BA instead collected dozens of specific facts and pieces of knowledge gained by others before him (most markedly TAP/YIPL magazine, as well as electronic journals) and presented it for the edification of phone phreaks in a clear, concise, expansive manner.

At the time of his writings, the quality of text files were generally poor (spell checkers were rare and rarely used) hard to read (many computer users tended to use all-uppercase writing, sometimes in 40 columns) and were often collections of rumors and innuendo collected directly from the message bases of the many hacker BBSs rising and falling around the country. With his 80 column, upper/lowercase text, all written in an easy-to-understand technical voice, Bioc's files caught the eye of the young phreak eager for information and held it as he "delivered the goods" throughout.

His most famous creations were the Basic Telecommunications Series, a set of essays about specific aspects of the Bell Telephone System and of telephone electronics in general. Pulling from many sources (which, in another rare show of the time, he would often cite), Bioc would write out the until-then forbidden fruits of knowledge that only a few learned or lucky phreaks had previously traded among themselves. Starting with the true basics (what long-distance services existed out there) and working up to the "tough stuff" (blue boxing, switching system specifics, pay phone electronics), he raised the bar of what amount of work would be put into "g-philes" from the time of his "BIOCs" on forward.

Bioc Agent was a frequent contributor to the Sherwood Forest series of BBS' in the New York State area, most notably Sherwood Forest II. Jason did once write to him, and learned that at the time of writing these files, Bioc was roughly seventeen years old.