A bit of Hacker History

Sean Caron scaron at umich.edu
Thu Dec 25 00:02:01 CST 2014


Cool, cool, definitely going to check this out. I came to them "after the
fact" but I spent a ton of time when I was younger reading Phrack, LOD TJs
and plenty of other g-files... Definitely it was formative in my passion
for retro computing... I mean, I wanted to experience first-hand all this
stuff I was reading about, right? Even tried my hand writing a few g-files
of my own as a bright-eyed n00b in middle school but I'll gladly leave
those to the dustbin of history, LOL.

I only got to experience a couple of years of solid BBSing before the
Internet took off for good and killed the scene but I loved it. Even in
Kalamazoo, MI, 616 LATA... comparatively out in the sticks... there were a
lot of good boards and a lot of good discussions. I think we have a pretty
dedicated crew of us trying to kind of emulate the experience on the C*Net
but it's tricky with all the jitter and latency of non-QOSed VoIP over the
public Internet. Someday, hopefully ;)

Best,

Sean


On Wed, Dec 24, 2014 at 10:51 PM, Ben Sinclair <bensinc at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks for your work on this! I have some reading to do now...
>
> On Wed, Dec 24, 2014 at 5:32 PM, Jason T <silent700 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > It's taken me far too long to get these things prepped and posted, so
> > why not a holiday release?  Some historical reading for your post-meal
> > time on the sofa:
> >
> > http://silent700.blogspot.com/2014/12/is-this-something.html
> >
> > The tl;dr version:  I was given some message board dumps from one of
> > the original hack/phreak scene BBSes, covering a portion of its short
> > run in 1980-1.  That led to obtaining some more, which I've cleaned up
> > and compiled into a PDF.  I feel they're an invaluable insight into
> > the "state of things" back then, not to mention just a fun read.  Some
> > familiar names in this lot...perhaps even some we know...?
> >
> > Happy $holiday(*) and enjoy...
> >
> > -j
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Ben Sinclair
> ben at bensinclair.com
>


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