Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

until FidoNet came along, creating a first taste of global networking for those who did not have Internet access. 8 BBSs were exciting, for they were informal bazaars where one could access and trade rare as well as sometimes-seedy information. Files traded there spanned lowbrow conspiracy theory, hard-hitting political news, playful nonsense, low-grade and more rarely high-octane noir, voyeurism, personal gossip, and one of the most important cultural goods among hackers, software (including shareware, warez, and eventually free software). Before free software was widely known, many young programmers acquired their software primarilyon BBSs, and many used this medium to release their own software into the world, usually as shareware.
    Since BBSs were unconnected to each other until FidoNet, and long-distance phone bills were expensive (especially for kids and teenagers), many boards were quite rooted in place, with users living in the same city, suburb, region, or local calling area (within which calls didn’t incur intrastate long-distance charges). The location of many BBSs was clear, as much of the online information was about local politics, news, and so forth. Many hackers recall BBSs as places of audacious social interactions that readily spilled into the real world during “BBS meet ups,” when participants would get together at someone’s home or “the local Denny’s at 3 in the morning” to continue doing what they did online: talk and trade software. Many BBS members became close friends. It is not farfetched to describe some areas has having a dynamic, complex BBS scene in which hackers, as one of them told me, would “haunt the multiliners and knew most everyone in the scene in the LA area.”
    At some meetings, hackers would erect a small-scale informal market to barter software and games, with such marketplace transactions cementing hackers together. As portrayed by one hacker in an email message, “My friends and I had shoebox after shoebox of games and utilities. [ … ] We’d trade over BBSs, at BBS meets (since they were all regional, it wasn’t uncommon to have meets once every couple months).”
    Despite its locally rooted nature and limited network capacity, a BBS, much like the Internet now, was technologically multifaceted, allowing for private and public interactions. Some BBSs were home to more subversive, harder-to-access underground hacker groups, which gained media notoriety in the late 1980s and early 1990s after a string of raids and arrests due to their actions, including some computer break-ins. Largely operating from within private BBS bunkers, these groups operated on an invite-only basis (Sterling 1992). Other BBSs and groups existed more publicly with phone access numbers listed in local computer magazines or posted on other BBSs, thereby attracting many nontechnical users who shared information on this platform.
    The mid- to late 1990s heralded the end of the BBS era—a passing that hackers would not let slip away without due commemoration and celebration. In 1993, to bid adieu to this artifact, hackers organized the first Defcon in Las Vegas. Meant as a onetime event, its popularity overrode its original intent, and Defcon remains one of the largest celebrations of hacking. The fact that the BBS period is now over indicates that much of the hacker lifeworld is constituted through technological infrastructures with their own features and histories, and as subject to birth, growth, and decay as any other social formation.
    While many younger hackers have never used a BBS, older geeks (which can mean a still-young thirty years of age, though there are certainly mucholder ones) in the presence of their younger counterparts will, at times, fondly reminisce about life and hacking on BBSs. For example, once when I asked about BBSing on an IRC channel, all the geeks started to share memories of this vanished era. One programmer humorously and with some retroactive embellishment explained his passion for BBSing with this short account:
     you call
     it is busy
     you set your modem on redial
     you wait
     your mom yells at you to get off the phone
     you stop redial
     haha
     she talks with whoever while you impatiently wait
     you finally learn *70, and life changes forever [*70 stops call waiting, which if activated, would boot you off the modem when someone else calls]
     you hide behind her door listening to her