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Additionally, I always felt like I wasn’t good enough to attend. I had never found the time to attend before and had always put it off “one more year” due to the amount of work I have. Out of all of the conferences out there, this is the one that was always considered the biggest and best.
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This is the closest you will get to the original conferences that we or our parents/relatives attended at the dawn of computing. While the Internet has changed the world around us, it hasn’t altered inquiring minds or researchers. It is built around people who love to explore, share knowledge, and learn about security and computing. It continues the tradition of the old computer and hacker conferences, such as the old Trenton Computer Festival (TCF), which have since either stopped operating or drastically changed.
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Even the people that met about their Commodores have their choice of multiple Vintage Computer Federation events.ĭefcon was chosen as the name because of two factors, which were that The Dark Tangent didn’t want an association with a particular time of year, and because the convention was taking place in Vegas, which was the nuke target in the movie War Games. The demo scene groups still have meetings in the US and Europe. There were numerous others, including the 2600 meetings, which still occur the first Friday of every month. There was HoHoCon in the Winter, PumpCon (which still exists) in the autumn in Philadelphia, and SummerCon in the summer. Diversi-dial (DDial) had at least one national convention. The scene members got together regularly at parties and meetings.
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Outdials, which were connections from these systems to standard telephone modems to allow for free long-distance modem calls, were critical for college students that wanted to call BBS systems at home.
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This extended to hacking, where numerous people got a hold of accounts on university or corporate systems that had Internet, TYMNET, Telenet or PC Pursuit connections, and extended the scene to Internet Relay Chat (IRC), proprietary chat systems, File Transfer Protocol (FTP) sites and Internet or network BBSes. Maintaining store and forward networks to relay messages, warez and files cost a lot of money at slow baud rates. Many of these networks and their brethren – especially the main one, FIDONet, before the Internet – relied on phreakers to help facilitate cheap or free communication.
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This was called phone phreaking and was part of the hacker scene. Many of the kids who grew up on Commodores, Apples, Amigas, Spectrums and PCs traded cracked/pirated games (warez), traded demos, chatted, and wanted to explore.Ī number of groups came together to find weaknesses in the phone system, Alliance Teleconferencing, payphones, the nascent wide-area networks such as TYMNET and PC Pursuit, and corporate phone systems so that they could avoid having to pay for these long-distance services. They charged significant amounts of money to make long distance calls. People used it to create ad-hoc networks that stored and forwarded files and messages across the world.īack in the late 1980s and early '90s, the phone company did not offer unlimited service. Fido was one of the protocols used to store and forward information before the Internet was pervasive and popular. According to their own FAQ, Defcon started as a party for members of “Platinum Net,” a Fido protocol-based hacking network out of Canada. Defcon is the one of the oldest and largest continually running hacker conventions, started by The Dark Tangent.