"VAX machines, and whatever other hardware they could get their hands on."
I was in high school in the New England area in the 80's. DEC donated a ton of great equipment to public schools, including pretty large VAX machines, terminals, printers, etc. From what I recall, it was driven a lot by a DEC exec named Russ Gullotti. It was pretty unusual at the time to be able to take Fortran, PASCAL, C, VMS, etc, classes in high school. I think this contributed quite a lot to the hacker vibe in the Massachusetts and New Hampshire areas.
>>> Half the L0pht worked at BBN at one point or another
An Oral History of BBN will perhaps never be recorded, alas. Lost to an era when esoteric technical knowledge was passed down from master to acolyte, and forever buried in layers of defense industry secrecy ;)
Bolt, Beranek and Newman Inc., A Case History of Transition
Some of the people who had 'enable' on the routers of AS1 in the mid to late 1990s are very much out there running senior network engineering things at some big ISPs and companies to this day. You might be surprised.
I was in middle school when I found the l0pht archives, a bunch of text from BBSs and stuff posted on the internet in the 90s. I remember this thing I read about the future of nanotechnology blew my mind so much that I printed it out and brought it to school to show my science teacher, she thought I was crazy and should focus on my grades. Whatever.
Top-level post was repeating some dogwhistle talking points, including insinuating that the editorship of 2600 or the hacker community of which they are a part have an agenda against white people and that freedom of expression is somehow being curtailed for toxic and hateful elements of society, and that that's a bad thing.
Scratch a person who repeats these talking points and you will, invariably, find a racist.
Again, this is dogwhistle for "I want to show my racist ass in public with no consequences". Nonracists don't fulminate about "the current narratives" or "pseudo-diversity".
I was in high school in the New England area in the 80's. DEC donated a ton of great equipment to public schools, including pretty large VAX machines, terminals, printers, etc. From what I recall, it was driven a lot by a DEC exec named Russ Gullotti. It was pretty unusual at the time to be able to take Fortran, PASCAL, C, VMS, etc, classes in high school. I think this contributed quite a lot to the hacker vibe in the Massachusetts and New Hampshire areas.