interests of 4chan users, it’s helpful to know where 4chan came from. The history of the web isn’t so much a story about technology as it is a story about people, and how the ways they interact with one another change when new technology allows them to try new things.
Phone Phreaks: Pre-Internet Hackers
One might argue that the roots of 4chan go all the way back to the ’50s, when a bunch of kids figured out how to get free long-distance phone calls by whistling a specific pitch into the receiver. These kids called themselves phone phreaks. Many of the phreaks were blind, with increased sensitivity to sound that enabled them to quickly learn the right pitch to mimic the phone companies’ control tones. Many were also social misfits, drawn together from across the US by their shared interest in technology, and more importantly, in breaking the technology.
In the late 1960s, one phreaker, John Draper—known by the nickname “Captain Crunch” after he discovered that a plastic toy whistle distributed in boxes of Captain Crunch cereal perfectly produced the right tone to hack into the phone network—helped to spread the hobby, which eventually permeated the MIT tech community, where the practice of hacking into communication systems continued, along with the rise of . . .
The Wild West: Usenet & BBSes
A lot of 4chan users laud their platform for hearkening back to the early days of the Internet. “Back then it was like the Wild West. There weren’t these structures in place to make sure that people stayed in line,” one anon told me. Another said, “And forget about the thirty-page terms of service documents.” If you stepped out of line, either you got banned or your transgression became the new law of the land.
Dating the birth of the Internet depends on your criteria. It’s difficult to pinpoint where a bunch of nerds playing around with modems stopped and “the Internet” began. Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) started appearing in the late ’70s. These were mostly local communities, since dialing into a BBS outside of your local calling area would have brought hefty long distance charges. I’ve talked to a few dozen people about those early days, from community managers to hackers to system operators, and they all agree on two things: the Internet in that era was expensive and slow.
BBSes were simple text-based precursors to message boards, where people could post messages to everyone else who happened to dial in. The boards often dealt with local interests and specific hobbies like fishing or philosophy. There were also boards dedicated to computing and hacking. It was in these that the first instances of what would come to be known as
leetspeak
bubbled to the surface. This pidgin English was used by hackers to get around wordfilters and, eventually, to avoid the prying eyes of search engines.
Hackers
became
h4x0rz,
for example. This argot is very common on 4chan, though it has been co-opted by people with no hacking ability and is now either used ironically or by noobs attempting to emulate the hackers of yore. Anyone who says things like, “ph34r my 1337 h4x0rz ski11z” isn’t going to bring down Bank of America any time soon.
In 1979, three grad students developed Usenet, a file-transferring network that ran on the Unix operating system. Users gathered in “newsgroups” with threaded discussions much like the message boards of today. Usenet differed from previous BBSes because it lacked a central server and system administrator. Apart from leetspeak, Usenet is known for being an early breeding ground for memes, though at the time they were limited to in-jokes and slang such as sockpuppet, cleanfeed, flaming, trolling, and sporgery. Despite the rise of more technologically advanced forms of online community, Usenet has experienced significant growth year to year.
Brad Templeton is a software architect and the creator of Usenet’s “Emily Postnews” (Postnews is a double pun
Phone Phreaks: Pre-Internet Hackers
One might argue that the roots of 4chan go all the way back to the ’50s, when a bunch of kids figured out how to get free long-distance phone calls by whistling a specific pitch into the receiver. These kids called themselves phone phreaks. Many of the phreaks were blind, with increased sensitivity to sound that enabled them to quickly learn the right pitch to mimic the phone companies’ control tones. Many were also social misfits, drawn together from across the US by their shared interest in technology, and more importantly, in breaking the technology.
In the late 1960s, one phreaker, John Draper—known by the nickname “Captain Crunch” after he discovered that a plastic toy whistle distributed in boxes of Captain Crunch cereal perfectly produced the right tone to hack into the phone network—helped to spread the hobby, which eventually permeated the MIT tech community, where the practice of hacking into communication systems continued, along with the rise of . . .
The Wild West: Usenet & BBSes
A lot of 4chan users laud their platform for hearkening back to the early days of the Internet. “Back then it was like the Wild West. There weren’t these structures in place to make sure that people stayed in line,” one anon told me. Another said, “And forget about the thirty-page terms of service documents.” If you stepped out of line, either you got banned or your transgression became the new law of the land.
Dating the birth of the Internet depends on your criteria. It’s difficult to pinpoint where a bunch of nerds playing around with modems stopped and “the Internet” began. Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) started appearing in the late ’70s. These were mostly local communities, since dialing into a BBS outside of your local calling area would have brought hefty long distance charges. I’ve talked to a few dozen people about those early days, from community managers to hackers to system operators, and they all agree on two things: the Internet in that era was expensive and slow.
BBSes were simple text-based precursors to message boards, where people could post messages to everyone else who happened to dial in. The boards often dealt with local interests and specific hobbies like fishing or philosophy. There were also boards dedicated to computing and hacking. It was in these that the first instances of what would come to be known as
leetspeak
bubbled to the surface. This pidgin English was used by hackers to get around wordfilters and, eventually, to avoid the prying eyes of search engines.
Hackers
became
h4x0rz,
for example. This argot is very common on 4chan, though it has been co-opted by people with no hacking ability and is now either used ironically or by noobs attempting to emulate the hackers of yore. Anyone who says things like, “ph34r my 1337 h4x0rz ski11z” isn’t going to bring down Bank of America any time soon.
In 1979, three grad students developed Usenet, a file-transferring network that ran on the Unix operating system. Users gathered in “newsgroups” with threaded discussions much like the message boards of today. Usenet differed from previous BBSes because it lacked a central server and system administrator. Apart from leetspeak, Usenet is known for being an early breeding ground for memes, though at the time they were limited to in-jokes and slang such as sockpuppet, cleanfeed, flaming, trolling, and sporgery. Despite the rise of more technologically advanced forms of online community, Usenet has experienced significant growth year to year.
Brad Templeton is a software architect and the creator of Usenet’s “Emily Postnews” (Postnews is a double pun
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