I finished writing Chapter 3 today, and started Chapter 4.

In preparing to write a description at the beginning of 4, I did a bit of research I really should have done before chapter 1 and neglected to do because I thought I could trust my memory.

Hah hah. WRONG!

At the beginning of the book, it's June 1985. My main character runs a Commodore 64 BBS and has a huge collection of demos and games -- in fact, he's got a hard drive, which was a hugely exotic item at the time. Due to plot things, his collection of demos becomes important and he trades a bunch of them with another character.

The problem is that there was no established demo scene in 1985. The first few appeared that year, morphing out of the crack intro, but there wasn't any sort of established scene until later in '86.

For a variety of reasons I can't easily just move the narrative forward a year or two (there's a bunch of plot stuff depending on very specific and time-limited tech). It's note a huge problem -- I've already solved it, in fact. I'll just make the focus in that part of the book be entirely on cracked games.

It's a problem that got me thinking of prevention, though. So I went out and got a copy of The Puzzle Palace by James Bamford, and I'm going to order up a couple more books from Amazon. I don't want to get caught similarly ill-informed when it comes time to write the government agency parts of the story.

Between phreakers, crackers, carders, a registered nurse and the FBI, CIA, NSA and NRO I am going to be utterly swamped in jargon. It's going to be interesting balancing it all so it's comprehensible to readers. Not everyone liked the new Miami Vice movie, and a commonly cited reason was that it made pretty much zero concessions to explaining things to the audience.