Is there a possibility that your “toxic manbaby” is a strawman and that you’re applying 2022 morality judgements on decades old events?
But we get it. You don’t like the guy.
She doesn’t like what he did.
Publishing code wasn’t that rare. My father’s Osborne 1 came with a manual which included a circuit diagram of the motherboard and a printout of the BIOS code. That doesn’t mean it was legal to build a new computer with those plans and sell it.
Things were different back in the day, but they weren’t that different.
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Yep. Nor the praise and adulation and money he received for it.
Upthread it was stated that he didn’t want the money, but had no choice. That’s not really how capitalism worked back then, nor how it works now. You don’t get what you don’t negotiate.
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My mileage varied massively from that. My experience with BBSes was very very different than yours. I’m happy yours was good for you.
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Nope, I was there. My memories of those communities are pretty vivid.
As for “2022 morality”, treating people who are different than you like garbage or starting flame wars over consumer brand loyalties are not things that were okay then either. Just because people did those things and nobody said out loud that it wasn’t okay doesn’t mean it was okay. Your phrasing makes it sound like the toxic behaviour was okay back then and it’s only not okay now.
Never met him. I am judging his actions in this one situation alone. I think I’ve been pretty clear about that.
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People knew better back then too, because this was well into the era of when women and gay rights were actively pushing for greater rights and treatment in the public sphere… This was the 80s, not the 10th century, ffs.
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You’re right. I shouldn’t have suggested that untenable position.
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That’s too bad. I don’t know where you were back then, so I guess things were just more enlightened where I was?
There were certainly no lack of creeps, “sovereign citizens”, gun fetishists, racists, *phobes, and other unsavory crapsacks that I avoided at all costs. I don’t recall things ever getting to the chan/kun level mostly because the reach was so local and limited that anything spilling over into meatspace would be the equivalent of shitting in your own pool. You were judged more by your contributions – be it by your uploads (hacking/cracking tools, warez, g-files, porn, etc), discussions on message boards, being a hookup for drugs, or monetary contributions to keep the whole thing going. It’s not like any these things were money-makers so there had to be something in it for the sysop to keep things alive. If anything, being “different” from the typical cis-het-white-male template often made you interesting rather than a target.
Of course this all changed for me once I graduated to the Internet in the mid 1990s and started using Usenet and IRC. The general awfulness of humanity became much more apparent at that point.
I admit that I may have a case of rose colored glasses here. I have hundreds of MB of 30+ year old captures that I’m hesitant to ever look at again because I don’t want to be retroactively embarrassed or horrified at things I said (or didn’t say), did (or didn’t do), or saw. (Although I have a feeling it’s probably mostly me quoting Skinny Puppy, The Smiths, Nine Inch Nails, or Depeche Mode lyrics and generally being a moody and insufferable teenager.)
Anyway I’ll stop derailing. I’m sorry you had shitty experiences with shitty people and it’s not my intention to diminish those lived experiences if it seems like that’s what I’m doing.
(ETA if we did somehow end up in the same circles back then and I wasn’t an ally due to ignorance, fear, or any other reason, then I profoundly apologize for this.)
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