The early 90s tech scene that created L0pht, the legendary hackerspace
cyberscoop.com
cyberscoop.com
Engaging writing in any case. So engaging that I thought there should be more lol.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In truth, pretty much every social "scene" has a small core of dedicated people surrounded by a much larger social clique. This becomes more and more true as it grows in size. There will always be the "talkers" who are good at communicating but have "marginal skills," but I'd argue everyone has different strengths. For example, there are some absolutely excellent hackers who are terrible writers, and other people who write quite well about hacking, but cannot hack themselves. We need both types.
While quite a lot of the worry about government monitoring might actually be paranoia, I'll simply note that Snowden's relevations showed that a lot of the fears were justified. Perhaps there are tradeoffs in privacy that you are willing to make, which others refuse to make.
https://www.2600.com/secret/pc/pc-pressrelease.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1992/11/12/h...
Yeah, socially organizing and motivating people doesn't rank very high on technical achievement, but it's often the difference between groups you've heard of and groups you haven't.
And guess who inspires more young people to go learn?
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski
[2] https://www.jwz.org/hacks/
(PS. If you click these, and your browser correctly forwards the refer(r)er URL, you will get a "funny" image, as jwz blocks links from HN.)
Delicious pizza @ DNA Lounge!
We used to sit in the dark sometimes in our old makerspace but it would really know work if everyone used a computer and nothing else. In makerspaces this is rarely the case.
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
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!
50 million views, 100k advertising dollars.
Of course, after that you'll have a synthesis of the two ideas emerging. That's too many steps ahead for me to predict, but there are passages from Iain M. Banks' Culture books which might be on the money.
I've been thinking about this a bit lately, albeit from a slightly different angle. I think people will begin looking for a different "reality" due to the homogenization of everything due to AI. That is to say, it's not "inauthenticity" as such that I think people will react to, but lack of originality and creativity.
I mean, when ChatGPT is writing all new books, screenplays, whitepapers, business plans, etc., etc., it seems to me that everything is going to collapse to one boring, homogeneous, "everything is the same as everything else" state. If my theory is right, the currency of the future might simply be "novelty" and human creativity.
This is, of course, all based on the idea that (current) AI's are, as Emily Bender put it, "stochastic parrots"[1]. All they can really do is spew up a somewhat randomized pastiche of human reality circa 2021 or so. So far they don't really have any innate creativity as such. That said, I don't see any reason in principle to think that AI won't also eventually be able to be creative is the same sense that we are today. What happens then is a whole other question.
ChatGPT needs humans to learn from though. It's very good at combining human knowledge and existing ideas. That's totally its thing.
Creative thought and new inventions? Not so much.
> everything is going to collapse to one boring, homogeneous, "everything is the same as everything else" state.
That's probably true. Like the circles you get in now when you try to Google something. Try to tweak your query and you keep getting the same shit back like it's the only few sites in the world. Really creepy, and probably the result of some overbearing algorithm or too many paid results.
It reminds me of this ST:TNG episode where one character is In a collapsing bubble where everything keeps disappearing.
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.
The consortium lists spaces in SF, Oakland, and father out. This could be a major motivator to move to SF.
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.
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
Really, how did he become a board member? Donated money or self-important resume? The rest of the board let him do it so it's a bigger problem than just him. Get the email list of membership and start a real space... there's lots of empty office space now so you might be able to get a donation since they get to write it off at old pricing, but it's a huge amount of work for very little return (unless you like running these sorts of things).
Sorry for your situation.
Our hacker space has had tons of leadership drama over the years, from misuse of funds to a co-founder trying to get a trademark on our name to do a hostile takeover.
Basically, if your hacker space exists because some tech people made big money in company stocks and decided to buy a personal playground, you're constantly subject to their whims and caprices.
Maybe that's someone's jam, but I just wanted to hang out with some nerds that reminded me of back home. Everywhere else I've traveled, I could visit the local hackerspace and get my fix, but the bay area was..... different.
I'm not anti-monetization by any means, but so often I'd end up in conversations that the other partner wanted to be a startup pitch, and I wanted to just talk about something cool. There's so much premature optimization of monetization out there.
I always compare this with the grumps back in the day who thought computers were worthless. And all have a smartphone in their pocket now of course.
We could see where it was going, and as well as that the journey there was just a ton of fun. Tech doesn't have to be perfect to be worth the time.
HN being a prime example outside of SF.
I've obviously been to Noisebridge. It didn't become a part of my life because it is at least an hour drive away, and often much longer during the times of day when I can reasonably go there.
Are you far from San Jose? I can see a way to get there from there, as it were. Redwood City has some of the right dynamics; I can also imagine something adjacent to the Computer History Museum. Again, not belittling your efforts over a decade (and I realise this sounds a bit like those drive-by health comments that say something like "have you tried taking vitamins?"), but I have some experience in this myself, and you've got me vaguely problem-solving around it now.
I've mostly been active around Palo Alto and Mountain View, which is ultimately my biggest mistake. The long and the short of it is, people from the larger companies generally don't seem interested in "extracurricular" activity, and students at local colleges don't stick around in the area. The most enthusiastic hackers here are growth hackers, which I am not and don't care for. I also get a lot of individuals who feel like they're washing out of their profession, but that's not the same mindset as tech enthusiasm.
I agree that fishing in San Jose proper is likely to turn out more students, recent grads, and other kinds of people who are more about exploring and trying things.
Corporate, BMW SUV-driving assholes who think of themselves as "liberals" but are ready to turn on anyone for any reason and excommunicate them without the possibility of fair treatment.
But yes, you are right. Back in late 90's/early 00's Linux and Unix desktop were trully different and unique. Fluxbox had zillions of different themes. 3D, black, retro, flat-ish, metal-ish, Java styled, Gnome styled, KDE-alike, Gaudi, childish, Bohemian, alien looking... every style was fine for anyone.
Ditto witht the icons. One day I felt technical and I switched into the Slick theme being "workstation/highend" themed with a gray color scheme, and the next day I felt nice and cheerful and switched into Noia with a blue Keramik theme.
Now everything looks bland, flat and everyone looks afraid on having an style.
I can't quite understand how "Linux GUI, make it look how you want! Personalized OS!" became "Linux - this one unchangably bland tablet UI on your desktop!"
I know that other WM/DM exist, but Gnome is incredibly popular, often the default, and was so close to being what people saw as the ideal Desktop.
I'd say things, ideas, opportunities and ways of being/thinking are even broader now than they were than when I was a teenager in the 90s.
Take a look at for example the youtube creator dashboard for an established creator, how it directly compares your videos against each other, trying and pushing you to get more numbers, entirely uncaring for anything other than eyeballs.
As a member of a hackerspace myself who's always wondering how to get rid of bad eggs: how does this "kicking out" process happen for the L0pht? Who gets to quantify their sweat equity and decide?
Even the "original" Hacker News was ran by a guy from L0pht.
Fond nostalgia for that era.
That Wikipedia also calls w00w00 a "think tank" when it was a social forum for teenage / college students is laughable too.
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.
I would not ask Google about those stuff today and I would certainly not dare downloading them for fear of triggering so many alerts and red flags. Today it would probably be possible to be jailed (in the UK) just for having this material on your computer.
It puts them on your radar, so when you're later investigating a pipe-bomb mailing spree and come across them again, you know better than to believe the "he would never / but he's such a good boy" you always hear from the parents.
But you're mostly wrong. The majority of people you would call British are classed as citizens, not subjects:
If you get arrested for child porn, will police get your google search history and check you haven't googled bad things? Sure.
Unless you piss off the wrong people that is. Selective enforcement is very much a thing.
Arguably "tame" but not something you want to be associated with today.
Or so I’ve heard from, ahem, some people during the early 00s.
I always wondered - was it pronounced “loft” or “low fat”?
I think the edginess comes from the implication that there were people out there actually doing this. And perhaps that people read this when they were 14.
2) I wonder if this magical period was only possible because it was reachable by a few, and this knowledge was not largely abused because of the entry fee.
3) AI is lowering the barrier to entry. The great equalizer, to see what we do with valuable insight ~ Politicians should fear computers more than disgruntled citizens.
4) I hope we don't see export laws changed to cover AI models like encryption was.
And punishment for abuse is mostly non-existent
HA!!! I ran a BBS Warez Site out of my North Tahoe High School CAD lab on an everex step cube on a 9600 baud modem in 1991
I was 14.
I was grounded for a MONTH for calling long distance into a BBS in San Jose CA in order to play "The Pit" and "Trade wars" and the phone bill was $926 and I failed to buy all the wheat in the galaxy and accidentally SOLD all my wheat failing to corner the market, but flooding it...
Yeah, that was on a 286 with an amber monitor that I convinced my dad he needed a computer for his business... and then a 2400 baud modem was important... so I could play Populous with a friend over modem.
Its wear i learned the first of Jaron Lanier and UI/AI/etc whatever he was talking about at the time.
Was later a long time subscriber to WIRED before they got too smug.
But the sold it in LAKE TAHOE. IN 1990-ish!
UHM, was also a subsccriber of 2600 and a total phreak (built blue/black boxes that fit into film canisters, and had an official captain crunch cereal whistle when it was released)
We used to troll 411 (in the early US, you could call "411" for "information" and it would connect you to operator who you then ask "Connect me with [BUSINESS] or [WHAT IS THE TELEPHONE NUMBER WITH PERSON X IN CITY Y]
So we wou;d have contests on how long we could keep the 411 OP online, and social engineer where they live, where work, how big call center, etc... we were like 14 years old and just doing this for laughs in 1988 or such.
I also pulled the famous 'packing tape on dollar bill' hack (theft) to play video games ;
So there was this 'hack' where you put a strip of packing tape (folded over itself such that the sticky parts are together) - you put them on a $1 or $5 bill\
You put the dollar into a vending machine at the post office to buy stamps.
You buy the cheapest amount of stamps, then you YANK the dollar-in-packing-tape from the machine...
You receive the stamps, the change from the yanked bill, take the change to the Safeway (grocery store) next door and you play the video games they had in them ; Defender and Contra.
It took us $25 in stolen quarters from the post office machine vuln to this attack to beat contra.
My buddy who I did this with is now EVP at Blizzard.
Back then it was 90% fun and maybe a few random guys were trying to figure out how to start some sort of tech business. It was mostly hobbyists just screwing around. That sense of play and screwing around is what made it so magical.
The last time I felt that kind of magic was when I attended an event called BIOcurious (Note the 'O' in previous word) where they showed complete novices how to use a minION device to sequence DNA with pipettes and reagents. It's the kind of thing that you need to be physically present for. The tech is not easy, but crazy powerful. With biotech gear getting cheap enough to be prosumer, maybe there will be that kind of extreme hobbyist thing forming around biotech? In a similar way, in the 80s computers went from things only big companies could afford to prosumer and even consumer devices and so all these people were getting involved just to see what they could do with these new magical devices.
the profit motive creeping in changes the dynamic completely. btw i think this seems to happen with everything, i don’t think it’s limited to just technology—it happens with anything that transforms from fun hobby. this always seems to sap the energy from many of the most passionate.
I love those because it's 2 days of challenging yourself to actually finish your project and do something crazy if you like. These constraints make it fun.
Our regular meetings are a good mix of hobbiests, professionals and the very occasional idea guy to allow great discussions and feelings of community.
Obviously there is no corporate sponsor and no prices besides the appreciation of your fellow hackers.
I also participated in "local government" sponsored Hackathon and while those are nice to meet people and encourage the bueocracy to embrace the modern world it's almost always about some social goal like accessibility, open data etc. These are important and interesting topics but the projects are never that "fun".
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27495517
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26mkK7s--I0 — not the video, the unexpectedly sincere description. Excerpt:
[...]
(retvrn to Konata)
Hey if I’ve been pretending it’s 2011 for the last decade so can you.
(le verboten maymay arrow)you will never watch “Haruhi Suzumiya Episode 1- Part 1” for the first time ever again
Or were you more indie, and instead hit up “The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya English Dub Episode 1 [1/3]”?
God what I’d do for my exact watch history from 10 years ago…
I think I jotted down the date and time, down to the morning I discovered Miku, at least I have that…
Miku lead to MMD (tutorials), which lead to Caramelldansen (heh), the top results after searching that were Haruhi (naturally), and then some time later I was led back to Haruhi. What good times…
.
I think the most profound think I’ve realised in life, after endlessly trying to recapture so many emotions, is that it’s not just a matter of being in the same place, with the same devices, watching the same media, at the same time of day, during the same season, it still won’t be the same.
Even with the same old friend group, it’ll be different, because not only are they all different people to who they were at the time, so are you.
You can never be that person again, and you can never experience it the same way again. That’s why nostalgia’s such a blessing, you can still feel things the same way, not by experiencing it again, but simply by remembering it.
I was talking to a friend, they said they got really into LOTR when they were in their late teens, read all the books cover to cover, absolutely loved them, and that they know damn well they’ll never read them again.
I think they understood the same thing.
Truth be told I think I’ve only watched all of Haruhi through three times, Yuki-chan maybe twice, Disappearance twice, and Lucky Star once, and those viewings of Haruhi have been spread pretty evenly over the last decade, I’m not sure I’ll watch them again for a while.
But I know I will watch them again.
Preferably from the rooftop of an apartment complex in Nishinomiya…
I was there in the BBS era too. I remember one such text file explaining a simple mechanism to light up a bomb without leaving much trace of the mechanism used to delay the bomb blowing up: it consisted of lighting a cigarette in which a small hole was drilled. Then the text file was going into details, explaining which type of cigarettes to buy so that it wouldn't consume too fast / not get blown by the wind / etc. It was totally hilarious too.
Louis Rossetto had this viewpoint 20 years before he launched Wired, and was smart enough to focus on the tech and tech people and tech business for the most part. The right-libertarian philosophy was doled out lightly and cleverly. Wired did try to make it seem that Silicon Valley was just a right-libertarian utopia, and made it seem everyone was of this mind - more than was the case.
R U Sirius had similar ideas. I think it made things seem different than they actually were.
I remember downloading it and putting it on a floppy disk, I'm not sure I ever even look at it :D
There was also this feeling at the time that I'm finding hard to express or even really understand. There was of course the corporate tech world, exemplified very nicely by various magazines and shows like Computer Chronicles. But there was this other world of real techno-culture that seemed to be growing and compounding on itself. There was literature like the Cyberpunk genre, music like early techno and what we now call IDM, BBSs, periodicals like 2600 and Mondo and countless zines. Wired launched sometime in that era. Linux was the work of a single disaffected hacker. The early piracy and demoscenes seemed to give other artistic voices to this counterculture. Technomages were concepts on popular tv. Early ftp and gopher sites (pre-WWW) felt like the work of super l33t nerds. The USSR had just fallen, information wanted to be free, and communicating with people across the planet became something we could do daily, helping us find more of us. It felt like we were building towards something -- billions of minds were about to be unlocked by the commoditized availability of information, computation, and communication and making money was a secondary thought.
And then there was a shift. I don't know when it was, but it felt like the shift onto the WWW allowed the Computer Chronicle watching corporate world to buy up, buy out, co-opt, and extinguish all of it. That nascent tech-culture of the BBS era wholly was unable to truly pivot to Web. Instead of connecting and growing us, it stole, fractured, and repositioned us away from those passions. The corporatists realized that we would never pay for things at the revenue they wanted, and slowly raised the temperature like frogs being boiled, with free services for advertising and entire generations of possible techno-culturalists were diverted from counter culture into optimizing ad placement. Instead of challenging people with new information and ideas, the populace was encouraged to build information echo chambers through which propaganda could be injected and money extracted. What we're becoming was not Hiro Protagonist, Y.T., or Case, but the cautionary "Fitless Humans" from Wall-E.
I'm writing this on a site called "Hacker News" which uses the word "hacker" in a way that I would not recognize back in the 80s and 90s, to drive discussion about hyper growth startups.
I think I'm going to go outside now.
Aloha
Ah. Brings back memories of talking Hayes commands directly to my modem via HyperTerminal, or maybe VB5.
In Spanish (PDF): https://underpost.net/ir/pdf/cyberpunk/la-caza-de-hackers.pd...
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.
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.
/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...
Riiiiiight
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.
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.
In ours we didn't even do this during the pandemic. We just kept going except during the strictest lockdowns.
Maybe it's just me but the end seemed too abtupt.. i want more!
> 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.