4 ms·
As a former Defcon attendee from the 90s, what made Defcon so successful as a business IMHO was that it was run and managed by folks who were only tangentially
by bink 5y ago
As a former Defcon attendee from the 90s, what made Defcon so successful as a business IMHO was that it was run and managed by folks who were only tangentially associated with the wider hacking community. Most of us who considered ourselves "underground" would never have dreamed of commercializing a conference the way DT did. At best you'd sell t-shirts to help pay for the cost of the venue.
It was definitely not associated with the military or govt. at the time though. That really came about with the founding of Blackhat and the open wooing of the Feds.
I should also say that almost no "hacker" conference, even back then, was primarily attended by hackers. We used to joke back then that Defcon was a "retarded fashion show" (sorry for the offensive terminology). There were always more journalists, narcs, and hangers-on at cons back then than people who were actually hacking anything.
- tptacek 5y agoAs a former Defcon (and Summercon and Pumpcon) attendee from the 90s, I think this is revisionist. "Spot the fed" was a friendly game at Defcon years before Black Hat. Was Defcon more commercial than Pumpcon? Absolutely. It was in Vegas! Pumpcon was an overgrown 2600 meeting! But Summercon in 1995 had Bob Stratton and Winn Schwartau as speakers. The reality is simply that there aren't that many people seriously criming, and there weren't that many before. Attendance at these events has always been driven primarily from enthusiasts and spectators; you couldn't even fill a bar with the number of meaningfully active people, even in 1995. (Obviously, this is a private-sector and America/Europe-centric observation).
- bink 5y agoHeh, if you were at both Defcon and Pumpcon then I'm sure we know each other. Summercon 95 was the height of Con chaos. But I wasn't trying to say Feds didn't attend Defcon from the beginning, they absolutely did. I was just saying that they weren't doing keynotes and certainly weren't running the con.