From the early 1980s onward, a flourishing culture of local, MS-DOS-based bulletin boards developed separately from Internet hackerdom. The BBS culture has, as its seamy underside, a stratum of ‘pirate boards’ inhabited by crackers, phone phreaks, and warez d00dz. These people (mostly teenagers running IBM-PC clones from their bedrooms) have developed their own characteristic jargon, heavily influenced by skateboard lingo and underground-rock slang. (more)

Operating systems

Although the Unix and NT communities may not like to hear it. In general, the more powerful and flexible the operating system, the more open it is for attack through its Web (and other) servers.

Unix systems, with their large number of built-in servers, services, scripting languages, and interpreters, are particularly vulnerable to attack because there are simply so many portals of entry for hackers to exploit. Less capable systems, such as Macintosh and special-purpose Web server boxes, are less easy to exploit. The safest Web site is a bare-bones Macintosh running a bare-bones Web server. (more)

We’ve already seen that hackers often coin jargon by overgeneralizing grammatical rules. This is one aspect of a more general fondness for form-versus-content language jokes that shows up particularly in hackish writing. One correspondent reports that he consistently misspells ‘wrong’ as ‘worng’. Others have been known to criticize glitches in Jargon File drafts by observing (in the mode of Douglas Hofstadter) “This sentence no verb”, or “Too repetetetive”, or “Bad speling”, or “Incorrectspa cing.” Similarly, intentional spoonerisms are often made of phrases relating to confusion (more)