During his childhood Assange attended 37 different schools, emerging with no qualifications whatsoever. "Some people are really horrified and say: 'You poor thing, you went to all these schools.' But actually during this period I really liked it," he later said.

Assange's social skills could seem lacking. The way his eyes flickered around the room was curious; one Guardian journalist described it as "toggling". And occasionally he forgot to wash. Collaborators who fell out with him – there was to be a long list – accused him of imperiousness and a callous disregard for those of whom he disapproved. 

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His obsession with computers, and his compulsion to keep moving both seemed to have their origins in his restless early years. So too, perhaps, did the rumblings from others that Assange was on the autistic spectrum. Assange would himself joke, when asked if was autistic: "Aren't all men?".

Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness & Obsession on the Electronic Frontier appeared in 1997. The book depicts the international computer underground of the 90s: "A veiled world populated by characters slipping in and out of the half-darkness. It is not a place where people use their real names." Assange chose an epigraph from Oscar Wilde: "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."

In the spring of 1991, the three hackers found an exciting new target: MILNET, the US military's secret defence data network. Quickly, Assange discovered a back door. He got inside. "We had total control over it for two years," he later claimed. 

Assange had published leaked footage showing airborne US helicopter pilots executing two Reuters employees in Baghdad, seemingly as if they were playing a video-game. He had followed up this coup with another, even bigger sensation: an unprecedented newspaper deal, brokered with the Guardian in London, to reveal hundreds of thousands of classified US military field reports from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, many of them damning – and the biggest leak, a deluge of diplomatic cables from US embassies worldwide, was yet to come.