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The early 90s tech scene that created L0pht, the legendary hackerspace
- leroy-is-here 4y agoIs there a second part to this article? It felt like it ended only part-way through. What happened after being invited to the space? History I suppose. Engaging writing in any case. So engaging that I thought there should be more lol.
- ecliptik 4y agoIt's an excerpt from the book Space Rogue: https://books2read.com/spacerogue https://books2read.com/spacerogue
- leroy-is-here 4y agoThanks, I missed that somehow. I went back and checked the article and, sure enough, I just have banner-blindness. If it doesn't look like text in a <p> tag I just ignore it.
- Slix 4y agoAre there any online/remote hackerspaces? Seems like a good idea. Being physically together is too much time and energy sometimes.
- wkat4242 4y agoI've never seen any. It feels like it goes against the grain of the very idea of a hackerspace. In ours we didn't even do this during the pandemic. We just kept going except during the strictest lockdowns.
- legerdemain 4y agoMeanwhile, here in South Bay, an activist board member (who is a senior lead at Tesla by day) just fired our longtime hacker space director with zero days notice because membership wasn't growing fast enough. Now our events are struggling and members are leaving because of this cavalier display of leadership. It is almost impossible to find tech-adjacent countercultural spaces in the Bay that aren't fully co-opted by a self-devouring corporate mindset.
- rolph 4y agothese may help https://hackaday.io/hackerspaces/ https://hackaday.io/hackerspaces/ https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/Bay_Area_Consortium_of_Hackerspaces https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/Bay_Area_Consortium_of_Hackers...
- legerdemain 4y agoThe closest one to me on the map is something called "the fifth space," but I can't find any online presence at all for it (it shares a name with an interfaith org in India, which is what most results are for). The consortium lists spaces in SF, Oakland, and father out. This could be a major motivator to move to SF.
- rolph 4y agonot all of these are considered active, some may have gone gray in presence, but still exist in some form.
- legerdemain 4y agoI appreciate your well-intentioned effort to help. Thank you.
- sacnoradhq 4y agoOld and outdated lists. The best thing to do is find some cool rich peeps, go in on a small commercial/industrial space to make it sort of like a college dorm, and keep the membership invite-only and tiny.
- rolph 4y agoyes old and outdated, but breadcrumbs... finding the trail and the desired endpoint is often an effective filter for prestige accounts [hey, im on 31l337h4X0r space] that dont have the properties of "adept hacker" 900913 maps is probably anathema to some thus they dont show up. its best to look thru a span of search engines with different DNS providers, you can dive deeper past the search bubbles
- flatiron 4y agoI remember getting local admin on my high schools nt3.5 box with l0phtcrack just to setup a http proxy so I can read wwf.com at the library. Fun times.
- hereforphone 4y agoI'd like to post my perception since I was a 90s hacker. Inclusivity is arbitrary here - no one in the scenes that I was familiar with were excluded because of race or sex - it's just that certain demographics weren't attracted to that 'scene'. Those like me, ADHD, awkward, and not extremely socially capable at the time, were however sometimes excluded. There were still the cool nerds and the lame nerds. I was pretty involved in the scene, being a staff writer of 2600 (several articles published under various handles, my name listed in the cover for a couple of years), and spending some time talking to "famous" people. Later I grew up, spent 4 years in the military, then used money I earned to finally go to college, graduating eventually with an engineering Master's in my 30s. As I grew up I realized that the whole 90s / early 2000s hacker scene was mostly just a social clique. I learned that many people who were revered had marginal skills. I learned that the paranoia and self-aggrandizement ("The FBI totally monitors #2600 to learn our skills") was really just immaturity. The whole thing eventually seemed lame as I grew into an adult. I realized 2600 was really just a money machine and a manipulative scheme. Phrack went downhill quick, sadly (I also published there). Still, this was a classic and wonderful time. Even I made friends - some that I talk to now, 20+ years later. I learned a lot. I got started on a tech path that took me very far and into regions of tech I'd never learn about otherwise like radio and telephone. I'm still a hacker, but legally. I don't miss the "scene" at all, but I do wish I was more included in it at the time. As this article illustrates it must have been great.
- EvanAnderson 4y agoI was on the periphery of the 90s "scene" and this rings true to me. One year at DefCon I ended up (somehow) tagging along w/ (some of?) the Cult of the Dead Cow crew and friends to a dinner. I had a decidedly "Wow, I'm sitting at the cool kids table..." kind of feeling. Age and location had a lot to do with it, too. I was in rural Ohio versus in Boston, Chicago, NYC, etc. I also did community college versus moving away. There were fewer opportunities for face-to-face hacker interactions when you might be the only person in your county into that kind of stuff. I still lean on my telephony knowledge from back then. It's amazing how much of it is still relevant even in the world of VoIP.
- 4y ago
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y agoI miss the more genuine and naive world of 90s hacking, or even something as simple as local LAN parties with people dragging their giant CRTs with them to be in a sweaty room with a bunch of other early PC gamers. I suspect those worlds aren't making a comeback.
- dasil003 4y agoAs a teenager at the time, there was a palpable feeling of being part of a counter-culture that was on the bleeding edge of an inevitable future which adults simply could not grok. That world definitely ain't coming back, in large part because global internet connectivity has rendered quaint the very notion of counter-culture. On the other hand, retro computing and nostalgia for the era has never been stronger or more accessible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3NQQ7bPf6U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3NQQ7bPf6U
- b800h 4y agoI predict that your second sentence will be thoroughly disproven by the next generation, who will go offline en masse to find reality once AI makes the entire Internet inauthentic.
- Jensson 4y agoThey wont be able to go back to their childhood programs because they wont exist any more, so nostalgia computing wont be a thing for them even if they wanted it.
- NovaDudely 4y agoComputer nostalgia is neat for a little while and emulation is making it easier than ever. As for the next generation - They won't go back to what we had but move forwards onto something completely different and new. Hopefully we will understand it, or just be the old folks yelling at clouds and children about how the world has changed!
- narrator 4y agoI was around in the early 90s on BBSs. One of the things that amuses me about people asking AI how to do bad stuff and all the handwringing about AI safety is that one of the popular things that was available for download on some of the less reputable forums in the early 90s were various "text files" that would give instructions for doing various illegal or morally dubious things. There were hundreds of these and it was a practical thing to share back when 1 megabyte took an hour to download. One that cracked up to no end that I still remember vaguely was "How to be a gigolo.". Apparently, you have to move to South Florida and wear a sport coat. I don't remember anything else from it except it was hilariously written. Good times. Also, since BBSes required a lot of technical knowhow to get into, it was this back channel for all the extreme teenage geeks in the local calling area. It was this phenomenally fun secret club that I met some exceptionally weird people through, but also lifelong friends. There were some great magazines of the time like Mondo 2000, and the ethos was real techno-libertarianism, information wants to be free, and all that fun stuff. Everyone was coming off the high of the Soviet Union falling apart and believed that now human liberty would flourish everywhere.
- bink 4y agoShout out to Jason Scott and textfiles.com http://textfiles.com/directory.html http://textfiles.com/directory.html
- alexsereno 4y agoThank you for this
- RGamma 4y agoThis feels appropiately oldschool, thx
- totetsu 4y ago[flagged]
- zozbot234 4y ago
- ilamont 4y agoI'm also a BU grad from that era. Loved reading this. Don't know the author, but I did know many of the places mentioned. Not sure where the loft was located, but it sounds like the area around Fort Point channel which used to be an artists colony (and also near the site of the infamous Channel nightclub) which is now one of the most expensive pieces of luxury real estate in Boston, the "Seaport" district. One observation about 80s and '90s tech communities: it's fascinating how groups of people would coalesce around interests, schools, small businesses, or whatever. In Taiwan, my landlord's eldest son eagerly showed me "Yamnet" which was a local BBS and hacker group he belonged to, I think through his college. I was listening to "How I Built This" podcast interview with one of the founders of Alienware, and his group in Miami was included a lot of second-generation Cuban Americans who got into 90s LAN games and building custom PCs. Even my hometown had a little group of teens who gravitated to the local indie computer store, "The Bit Bucket," to hack on TRS-80s, Commodore-64s, Apple IIe's and early PCs. These communities seemed to be everywhere, even if they were largely invisible to most people.
- mtalantikite 4y ago> Don't know the author, but I did know many of the places mentioned. I was too young to be involved at this particular point in time, but my parents would bring me to that Au Bon Pain and The Garage as a kid in the late 80s/early 90s. I totally know that pizza spot the author mentioned. It's funny to think that not too long after, as a teenager in the late 90s, I'd be aware of those hacker handles, completely unaware that they had been gathering in those places too! When I finally was allowed to roam Cambridge by myself (late 90s) I remember I'd make my friends stop off at the newsstand in Harvard Square near The Garage to pick up copies of 2600. Really interesting to fill in a little of that history with landmarks I'm familiar with.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y agoWhenever I read stuff about BBSs, I always feel so glad that I skipped this entire subculture by being on initially Bitnet and then Usenet plus a bit of IRC. Most of the descriptions of BBSs make them sound like an entirely different place, and although maybe more "hacker intensive", certainly less cordial. But then again, maybe that was just the bit of Usenet I was on.
- ghaff 4y agoThere were definitely different cultures within the BBS world. I was on a fairly small-time but professionally run BBS that wasn't really part of the warez/hacker community. One thing that was different a lot of the time from Usenet was that, given you were dialing up from home at a time when telephone calls were expensive, if you were into BBSing, you tended to get a subscription to a local board, so it was fairly natural to form a local community around the main board. I guess Usenet had some local forums but my Usenet experience was that it was mostly locationless. (The bigger BBSs like the one I was on had relay boards like Fidonet but there was definitely a local vibe on the main board.) There also just wasn't a lot of overlap between BBSs in their heyday and the people who had access to the Internet from school or work.
- jeffreygoesto 4y agoOMG the Bitnet. 91 there were about a hundred machines from which people came into the relay (chat) and we thought we knew them all... Had to press Enter every once in a while on the IBM 3270 terminal to see if somebody wrote in the chat. If there was a sudden storm of answers you got really busy reading and answering... /signon That was before all those people started to shuffle into IRC even... I also remember getting the "Datenschleuder" where you could read how to build your own 300baud acoustic coupler...
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y agoI was using Bitnet in 1986, and my main memory is the way the "hottub channel" would get busy as the USA headed into nighttime (east coast first, later west). It was amazing how lascivious people could be with just text! :)
- matt3210 4y agoI remember this stuff going on but I was very young (8) and just starting out with my ISA breadboard at the time.
- oldstrangers 4y agoMy entire identity growing up was L0pht, cDc, 2600 magazine, defcon, etc. Even the "original" Hacker News was ran by a guy from L0pht. Fond nostalgia for that era.
- hunter2_ 4y ago> ATDT Ah. Brings back memories of talking Hayes commands directly to my modem via HyperTerminal, or maybe VB5.
- StanislavPetrov 4y agoSame here! Although I also thought of ATDP (the bad old days of pulse dialing).
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- max182 4y agoOnce I make my money I dream of opening a 90's esque hacker space like you see in movies like Hackers. Dark warehouse, neon lighting, The Protegy playing in the background, a place where hackers can bring there machines, talk tech and rage. Coffee in the mornings, bar at night.
- edvinbesic 4y agoAre you me?
- anony23 4y agoWe are all us.
- LeoPanthera 4y agoThat's funny, I've always wanted to open 90s-style Internet Cafe here in the bay area. Maybe not so much Prodigy, but now that my generation is all in their 40s and 50s, I figured it would be fun to combine really really good internet access with retrocomputing resources. I don't know if anyone's done that before. And I doubt it would be profitable. But I'd enjoy it.
- almost_usual 4y agoI’d totally go to this. I miss the 90s era Internet cafe.
- dig1 4y agoJamie Zawinski [1][2] (Netscape/Mozilla/Emacs/XscreenSaver fame) is running something similar called DNA Lounge [3], and has a blog with all sorts of stuff [4], from automating things with perl to running a night club business. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski [2] https://www.jwz.org/hacks/ https://www.jwz.org/hacks/ [3] https://www.dnalounge.com/ https://www.dnalounge.com/ [4] https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/ https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/
- anthk 4y agoA must read. The Hacker Crackdown. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/101 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/101 In Spanish (PDF): https://underpost.net/ir/pdf/cyberpunk/la-caza-de-hackers.pdf https://underpost.net/ir/pdf/cyberpunk/la-caza-de-hackers.pd...
- sacnoradhq 4y agoThis is a hilarious revisionist history labeling a "hackerspace". That Wikipedia also calls w00w00 a "think tank" when it was a social forum for teenage / college students is laughable too.
- bongoman37 4y ago[dead]
- Thorentis 4y agoJust to be pedantic, he said that the BBS could only accommodate 8 char usernames, but that he picked "Space Rogue" - 10 chars without the space.
- provenance 4y agoManifesting an angel to sponsor a low key hackspace on Oahu. Plz email rapht at nshkr.com Aloha
- anon25783 4y agoThose whom this interests should check out the Tildeverse
- yourpaltod 4y agoThis thread made me check in on https://www.pigdog.org/ https://www.pigdog.org/ and yep, it's still bad craziness.
- spiritplumber 4y agoI'm glad I caught the tail end of this.
- weld 4y agoIf you are in the Bay Area during RSA Conference, Space Rogue and me, Weld, are going to be fireside chatting and signing books at the W Hotel. Come get one and hang out! https://info.veracode.com/rsa-2023-book-signing.html https://info.veracode.com/rsa-2023-book-signing.html
- bilekas 4y agothis was a really cool read. Written really well too but is there more ? Maybe it's just me but the end seemed too abtupt.. i want more!
- abksa 4y agoFun times. Anyone here remember Altos?
- paulpauper 4y agoA way back, I went to school with someone who fit this stereotype. Like out of The Matrix: trench coat all-black attire, sunglasses, good coding skills I presumed, smart, fast typist, always had laptop.
- H4ZB7 4y ago> something something privilege > text only i'm a big guy now > no indication of what this group actually was unless i perhaps read every paragraph > i liked the thing because of camaraderie now you know why the hacker scene was always garbage. and internet forums. it's all mediocre people who are just there for camaraderie and jerking each other off over these false virtues.
- wkat4242 4y agoIs this the same l0pht that wrote l0pthcrack, the legendary Windows password brute force tool from the 90s? I used that a lot though these days it's long been replaced by hashcat of course.
- adam_gyroscope 4y agoI had accounts on ATDT East & The Works, and ran a Wafflenet BBS on the south shore of Massachusetts. I was .. 14? 15? And would travel up to the 2600 meetings as often as I could convince my parents to drive me to the T stop. One memorable night I was invited to go to the l0pht and go trashing afterwards. It was awesome, I got a copy of the Nynex dental plan which I gave to someone on The Works who asked for it. No idea why they wanted it. I also met Lemon (later Lady Ada) at the 2600 meetings. I had no idea at the time how big a deal l0pht was, I was just happy older kids tolerated me.
- antiterra 4y ago> BBSs were all text all the time — no graphics, no icons, or avatars to go along with your posts and musings. ANSI/ASCII artists might beg to differ a little? Of course you couldn’t plop down reaction gifs or a quick photo of something you saw. However, BBSs were often distribution paths for demos/intros/cracktros which contained plenty of rambling musings in their scrollers.
- hker999 4y agoWhen I was younger, I wanted to be part of it. Now, I realize that most of the leaders in this community are just petty dictators that at the time, had no power. Now that their political party is in power, most support suppression of free speech, total government overreach like forced vaccinations, and especially suppression of their political enemies, and war. Everything they rallied against during the Bush era. Hacking then also took a moderate amount of skill. Encryption was virtually non-existent and finding security holes was easy, especially when companies didn't patch anything. It made me realize they were never hackers, just activists in hackers clothing. I lost all respect for the leaders of the hacker community from that era. Covid brought out the true colors of many.
- StanislavPetrov 4y agoBrings back memories. Going to 2600 meetings in the early 90s at the Citicorp center (in the food court, near the pay phones) and playing "spot the fed". One clarification, though. He says: >BBSs were all text all the time — no graphics, no icons, or avatars to go along with your posts and musings. In fact ANSI art was huge on BBS's back in the day. ACiD, UAA and a variety of other groups all created spectacular "graphics" that virtually every BBS (especially "elite" boards) featured on their splash page.