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Comment by loydb | Hacker News Reader

Randy and Craig (Taran King and Knight Lightning) did an amazing job with Phrack. It was an honor to write for them, and I almost never see them mentioned when people talk about the zine. The zine, and the St. Louis Summercons, were hugely influential. I'm still friends with a bunch of folks from that scene.

If it weren't for a timely late night phone call from Craig needing some more content for an issue, the Conscience of a Hacker would probably not have been written.

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Howdy crap The Mentor itself... your Hacker Manifesto marked me as a kid in the 80s. It gave meaning to my life growing in a remote Mexican city where few people understood about computers.

Thank you :)

And me in the late 90s/early 00s :D

I printed it and carried it with me to school and read it over and over.

Agreed, same here, the Hacker Manifesto was amazing to read as a kid diving into computers, hacking and Phreaking...

Jesus and the Mary Chain, the Mentor himself in the flesh.

When I was a senior in college studying Anthropology and subcultures (specifically hacker culture), several of my roommates who were engineers and CS majors told me I absolutely needed to read your essay.

To this day, it's still one of the most influential essays I read about the culture and understanding the ethos of an ethical hacker. After getting involved in the scene in the late 90's, I found out reading your essay was almost a rite of passage.

It's an amazing work that is timeless and still resonates to this day.

Thank you for writing that. Those words spoke deeply to me and many others that wander these halls even so many years on. It is odd to look back on years later and happen across the author.

I hope life is finding you well!

The same is sort of true of the mid-late '90s Phrack scene; I was skimming through some of the front matter on those issues and noticing how many people in the greets sections were people I'm still in touch with. Of course, this stuff got lucrative for us in a way that I'm not sure it was in the late '80s. But you guys had more fun than we did.

I could not be the same after reading your essay. Thank you sir.

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