To the best of my knowledge, Mitnick didn't really code at all. There are (let's call them) intrusion specialists whose skillsets don't really involve systems programming, but rather intuition and tenacity, and there are others who write exploits. My understanding is that Mitnick was the former, and was using tools he got from friends and peers.

He's also on the winning side, so I imagine it'd be in his best interest to make himself look better.

John Markoff was the one that made everything up.

Freedom Downtime is a documentary that explains it.

Anyone who has studied the later parts of the phone system know that at least a few of his stories are actually bullshit.

It wouldn't be until much later (in the 90s at least, while he was in prison) that the advent of pure digital switching would enable the random reassignment of phone lines like he describes in the story about turning his friend's home phone into a payphone.

The lines were separated and had differences in sender frames just for payphones, plus typical phones weren't too happy when 130VDC was applied to them for very long.

The fact of the matter is that Mitnick went around and shook doorhandles until something opened and occasionally convinced someone to open a door for him her and there, and the fact that the emperor had no clothes was too politically inconvenient for the kinds of companies that Mitnick hit up.

I heard him on Art Bell multiple times talking about it. I many cases, someone else did the ground work and he just used it.

Kevin hasn’t hacked anything at all. He ran with a few other characters who never received anywhere near the amount of attention that Mitnick did. For example, no one ever figured out who “jsz” was.

After hearing his voice messages in a fake asian voice trying to mess with Shimomura, I kinda lost all respect for Mitnick.