The Social Organization of the Computer Underground (1989) | Hacker News Reader

The Social Organization of the Computer Underground (1989)

textfiles.com

41 pointskeepamovin10 comments

If you enjoy this sort of history and haven't read The Cuckoo's Egg[0] yet, you're in for a treat.

[0]https://www.amazon.com/Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Computer-Espiona...

I'll also recommend The Hacker Crackdown and Exploding the Phone.

Thank you both! These are all good recommendations in these comments, I'm adding all 3 to my Amazon list! :)

I love how text is formatted in these documents. It shows a level of attention and care I don’t see often in modern markup/HTML/Word/Pages pipelines. Maybe it is some TeX magic but I like to believe they hand formatted the ASCII back then.

> I like to believe they hand formatted the ASCII back then

That thesis is from 1989. There were plenty of ASCII text formatting tools available back then, such as "nroff"[1] on Unix, which dates back to 1972. We weren't formatting hundred-page documents by hand.

(The RUNOFF program that nroff was based on was first released in 1964.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nroff

Wow, I always thought this stuff was done by hand. I had no idea! Yeah, I recently discovered how to turn these old ascii docs into PDFs and page images in a way that preserves their beautiful formatting, using LaTeX:

    input_file="my_file_downloaded_from_textfiles.txt"
      cat <<TAO > "file.tex"
    \documentclass{article}
    \usepackage[left=2cm,right=1cm,top=2cm,bottom=2cm]{geometry} % Adjust the global margin
    \usepackage{listings}
    \usepackage{beramono}
    \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

    \lstset{%
      language={},%
      basicstyle=\ttfamily,%
      linewidth=19cm,%
      breaklines=true,%
      breakatwhitespace=false,%
      texcl=false,%
      literate={\\\}{{\textbackslash}}1
    }

    \begin{document}
    \pagestyle{empty}  % Remove page numbers

    \lstinputlisting{"$input_file"}

    \end{document}
    TAO

I put it into a project here: https://github.com/dosyago/chai

it literally says Master's thesis on the first page.

Submitted title was "The Social Organization of the Computer Underground – Criminology PhD Thesis" but we don't need that last bit and we do need the year, so I've swapped the one for the other.

I would respectfully submit that "Criminology PhD Thesis" totally recontextualizes the text and is more meaningful than the year, especially because the domain "textfiles.com" is explicitly intended for decades-old media

I think I have to disagree on both points. "Totally recontextualize" sounds like editorializing to me, which is something we try to avoid here (especially when factually incorrect!), and putting the year on more-than-a-year-old posts is pretty much a universal convention on HN.

Most people won't recognize textfiles.com as signifying 'old material' and in any case they publish new posts on that domain too (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35050858).

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