Factory is probably too grand a word for it, but the space that would eventually become the first home of L0pht Heavy Industries began as the location

‘We Got to Be Cool About This‘: An Oral History of the L0pht, Part 1 | Decipher

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2021-07-02 23:30:09

Factory is probably too grand a word for it, but the space that would eventually become the first home of L0pht Heavy Industries began as the location of a hat-making business. The second-floor spot in a building in Boston's South End was where the wives of two of the L0pht founders spent their days making and selling hats. Soon, it would be the workspace of some of the top white hat hackers on the planet.

In 1992, the hacker scene in Boston was thriving. The city, along with Cambridge, its funkier neighbor across the river, had been ground zero for many of the technologies and companies that helped lay the foundation of the Internet in the 1970s and 1980s, and as the 1990s dawned, a new generation of free thinkers, coders, tinkerers, and engineers was emerging. This was the first generation with easy access to personal computers and many of the people who emerged from the Boston scene had spent their formative years teaching themselves how to write code and taking apart early IBM PCs, Apple Macintoshes, VAX machines, and whatever other hardware they could get their hands on.

With the web still several years away from taking over, hackers and hobbyists relied on BBS boards for communication and to trade tools, techniques, and information. It was on boards such as The Works that some of the key figures in the Boston scene first came together. Later, the local 2600 meetings became the center of gravity for much of the community, which was growing quickly by the early 1990s. The meetings brought together the disparate threads of the community: professional coders, engineers, self-taught developers, hackers, college students, and even some high school kids.

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