How long does it take to read The Cuckoo’s Egg?
Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage
The Cuckoo’s Egg by Clifford Stoll takes about 7 hours 20 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 7 hours 20 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1989. 400 pages, about 110,000 words.
15 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 12 hours 13 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 7 hours 20 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 4 hours 35 minutes |
The page count is the median across 18 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
In the days when the presence of a computer did NOT presume the presence of a network (they used to be freestanding units that could not easily communicate with another system), accounts to use the computer were expensive to maintain and heavily scrutinized by management. When the Accounting staff of Stoll's university employer discovered 75 cents' worth of time used with which no user was associated, they called him and demanded that he locate the "phantom" user. Stoll wasn't even a computing pro - he was an astronomer that used the computer to run programs that pointed telescopes properly. But he was a member of a club that exists today - that person elected to do network administration because he drew the short straw. Stoll tells the ensuing circa 1985 tale of analysis when people worldwide were only just discovering what networks could reveal... and hide. Rather like today.
Subjects: Soviet Espionage, Computer crimes, Classified Defense information, Databases, Bases de datos, Espionaje ruso
