In case you haven't read them yet. I very highly recommend those two books:
— The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier, by Bruce Sterling.
— The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking A Spy Through The Maze Of Computer Espionage, by Cliff Stoll.
Both are excellent reads, and if you like old Usenet and BBS stories, you'll be served.
EDIT: By the way, the first one is freely available here: http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html. I have it in paper myself, but surely it is possible to make a good ePub from these HTML pages.
"The Cuckoo's Egg" is an amazing book. I read it some months back and very much regretted not having read it earlier... It does a fantastic job of bringing 80's computing to life while at the same time boasting a plot stronger and more exciting than many thrillers (though true!).
"The Hacker Crackdown" is worth reading for the historical aspect, but it only deals with crackers, so I personally did not find it particularly engaging. (BTW, an epub is available via Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/101)
A third book that should be mentioned here is "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" by Steven Levy, which I'm currently reading. It deals with "real hackers", starting in the 50s at MIT - a deserved classic.
The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier, by Bruce Sterling.
This, especially, since a new generation is facing the exact same battles that Sterling wrote about. We still have computer-illiterate prosecutors going berserk on a regular basis. And thanks to devoted public servants like James Comey, we're going to spend the next couple of Congressional terms rehashing the old arguments over what math equations should constitute a Federal offense.
The government doesn't learn from history, so it's important that the rest of us do.
I've found several of this 'line scan' type terminal fonts in the past (and yes, I am a veteran of DEC VTs) - but unfortunately none of them render properly on Windows at lower point sizes - has anyone else had this problem?
Apologies for the overloaded terminal emulator on the website which is not letting many people run tin. Was not really expecting to be randomly on HN 5 years deep into olduse.net's run.
The architecture, for the curious, is simply shellinabox serving up a shared screen session with tin in it run on a couple of VMs. That doesn't scale super well.
Since it's been 5 years since I put that together, it's probably feasible now to simply compile tin to javascript with emscripten, run the whole thing out of the user's browser, and tunnel the nntp traffic out to the news server. Would scale much better. If someone would like a fun little project..
(In 10 years, the size of the whole olduse.net archive will probably be not much larger than the size of the average web page, and I can upload a single static file implementing olduse.net to IPFS?)
