An Oral History of the L0pht (2018)

duo.com

130 points·whiteyford··10 comments

"VAX machines, and whatever other hardware they could get their hands on."

I was in high school in the New England area in the 80's. DEC donated a ton of great equipment to public schools, including pretty large VAX machines, terminals, printers, etc. From what I recall, it was driven a lot by a DEC exec named Russ Gullotti. It was pretty unusual at the time to be able to take Fortran, PASCAL, C, VMS, etc, classes in high school. I think this contributed quite a lot to the hacker vibe in the Massachusetts and New Hampshire areas.

>>> Half the L0pht worked at BBN at one point or another

An Oral History of BBN will perhaps never be recorded, alas. Lost to an era when esoteric technical knowledge was passed down from master to acolyte, and forever buried in layers of defense industry secrecy ;)

Bolt, Beranek and Newman Inc., A Case History of Transition

http://web.mit.edu/6.933/www/Fall2001/BBN.pdf

Some of the people who had 'enable' on the routers of AS1 in the mid to late 1990s are very much out there running senior network engineering things at some big ISPs and companies to this day. You might be surprised.

I was in middle school when I found the l0pht archives, a bunch of text from BBSs and stuff posted on the internet in the 90s. I remember this thing I read about the future of nanotechnology blew my mind so much that I printed it out and brought it to school to show my science teacher, she thought I was crazy and should focus on my grades. Whatever.

Discussed a bit at the time (of the article):

‘We Got to Be Cool About This‘: An Oral History of the LØpht, Part 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17133416 - May 2018 (30 comments)

You would think you could listen to an oral history right? Looks like it might be better titled "a written history".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com