Dear Hacker: Letters to the Editor of 2600

Chapter 8. A Culture of Rebels

Rebellion. Individuality. The sharing of information and the quest for knowledge. That's really what the backbone of the hacker world is all about. And it has remained unchanged since the very first letter was printed in 2600.

Of course, circumstances themselves have changed. You'll note in the early years that people seemed almost obsessed with getting "busted" or "raided." The very basic reason for this is because that's exactly what was happening to an awful lot of us. It was a very different world. You couldn't just easily connect to networks, exchange information, and spend long amounts of time on the phone like you can today. But that didn't mean we didn't want to. Those of us infected with the hacker bug knew just how cool it all was to communicate and learn all about technology. It simply wasn't all that easy, not without breaking a number of laws.

It wasn't at all uncommon for an innocuous thing like a computer bulletin board system to be seen as a threat by the authorities. This is why there were so many BBS raids back then. Those in charge had no idea what the hackers were up to or what we were talking about. By seizing our equipment, they had the opportunity to learn themselves. Of course, the hackers were also trying to seize equipment that wasn't theirs, mostly in the form of accessing telephone switches and the crude data communication networks of the day. Along the way, we tried to hold onto certain values: information should always be ...