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Comment by Sendotsh | Hacker News Reader

It was absolutely in use on IRC in the mid 90s or earlier.

We used it plenty to diss the kids pingflooding their school then saying they hacked it, or using winnuke or Back Orifice (manually, by installing the client themselves) on a friend.

If you used a downloaded tool without any interest in how or why it worked, you were a script kiddy. There wasn’t really a definition or anything, you just knew.. the person was leet, or they were a skid.

Searching for the term probably won’t help much though as we bastardised as much text as possible back then. 5cr1p7 k1ddy, sk1d, skiddy, scriptkid, skript kiddy.. it was essentially a sport to make your text as illegible as possible while still being able to understand each other. A form of slang I guess.

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> it was essentially a sport to make your text as illegible as possible while still being able to understand each other

: 50|27 0|= |\/|:55 7y|*:|\|6 1:|<3 7|-|:5 |3|_|7 47 73|-| 54|\/|3 7:|\/|3 : [)0|\|7 |\/|:55 :7 47 411

It's so dumb we used to think of this as a form of securing our chat...

At least mum and dad couldn't read it.

God that took me five minutes to parse... but after you wrap your head around it, it’s not so bad.

I imagine it was easier to parse out in a monospaced terminal’s font?

"I sort of miss typing like this but at the[teh?] same time I don't miss it at all"

Searching should work as long as you're happy to kiboze with:

grep -E '(5|s)((c|k)r?(i|1)(p)(t|7))?( ?)(k)(1|i)(d*)(y?)(i|1)?(e)?'

...or similar.

Thank you for reminding me how much I hate regex

FWIW I did

    grep -riE '(5|s)(c|k)r?(i|1)(p)(t|7)( ?)(k)(1|i)(d{2,3})(y?|(i|1)?(e)?)' ./b/tmp/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-archive/

and got no hits (your original hits lots of usage of "skidding"). Source of that archive is archive.org - https://archive.org/details/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-archive.

There are a lot of hits on "kiddies" in comp usenet groups. For example:

    From: SYSMSH@ULKYVX.BITNET.UUCP
    Newsgroups: mod.computers.vax
    Subject: how to stomp on your kiddies
    Message-ID: <8605210414.AA16691@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
    Date: Thu, 15-May-86 16:48:00 EDT

but not "script kiddies". I think it's just used as a general term for uninitiated or novice computer users, especially from a sysadm persepective.

FYI, "skidding" is short for "script kiddie-ing".

Cool, none of the examples I noticed were referencing that AFAICouldT.

Yep, I was on IRC from about '93 onwards... I remember it from the mid-nineties, I can't lock down specifics, but I remember the computer I was using at the time.

Can confirm the word "skid" too, and searching for any of these words is going to be problematic with all the bullshit l3375p33k.. So good luck using a regex or text search

but yeah holy shit winnuke/back orifice... wow that takes me back!

I remember a wave of people popping up in the late 90's when sub7 dropped, as a couple were embedding it in Scene rips and re-distributing them on efnet and dalnet warez channels. Spent a lot of time helping people remove it only for them to re-install with the next Photoshop crack.

We called them "skids", so yeah lots of variations.

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