> Then: Phrack was the Rosetta Stone. 2600 was gospel. IRC was sacred ground.
Zines were copied, not monetized. We earned respect by contributing tools,
ideas, or code, never by chasing clout.
2600: The Hacker Quarterly is definitely not quite what it was decades ago, but I was still so giddy when my first article got published there that I dereferenced a null pointer on purpose.
There's an interesting point hidden here. A lot of people claim that 2600 is obsolete because it is still in print as opposed to going full digital like a lot of places did.
30 years ago, a lot of us thought that the internet and digital would bring freedom. We would no longer have to rely on the good mercy of book stores or newsstands willing to stock the magazines, or convince reluctant editors to print articles. We could just put it online where it would live forever.
It turns out that when something is online, it is much easier to ban or censor. Remember when the drama about Kevin Spacey came out, and all the streaming services removed his movies and TV shows? What about when a news story is posted and gets a bit of heat, so the editor goes in to edit it to remove the offending bits to appease the mob? Or deletes an article because they had bad blood with the writer?
If you have a physical DVD of a movie, no streaming service can block it. And if you have the print version of the newspaper or the magazine, then the editor can't just break into your house and cut the article out of the issue. I mean I guess they could, but that is a LOT harder than just clicking a button in a CMS.
Yeah, this was actually a huge controversy a few years ago and actually happened with digital ebooks. Some older Roald Dahl books, such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, had their language updated by the copyright holders, and the changes were automatically pushed to people’s Kindles silently updating the versions they already owned.
Nobody back then would have ever said IRC was “sacred ground.” What does that even mean?
And I read 2600 and also occasionally submitted, but it certainly wasn’t treated as gospel. Also of course there was clout chasing — most of the scene was teenagers trying to impress each other!
This article is the perfect exemplification of that Good Will Hunting quote: "So if I asked you about art you’d probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo? You know a lot about him. Life’s work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientation, the whole works, right? But I bet you can’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You’ve never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling. Seen that."
This article is clearly written by an LLM, so it figures that it uses bad analogies and silly tropes. It's the average of badly written stuff on the subject, and there was a lot of badly written stuff about this subject back in the day.
> Then: Phrack was the Rosetta Stone. 2600 was gospel. IRC was sacred ground. Zines were copied, not monetized. We earned respect by contributing tools, ideas, or code, never by chasing clout.
2600: The Hacker Quarterly is definitely not quite what it was decades ago, but I was still so giddy when my first article got published there that I dereferenced a null pointer on purpose.