[INTPenis]

The author might have had more luck grepping through irc logs from the 90s. If they exist.

I was also born a bit too late but I was active on IRC during the last 3 years of the 90s and remember the term script kiddie being so much a part of the fabric of IRC that we had already started to type around it, so to speak.

For example instead of saying script kiddies I'd just call myself a kid and it would be implied. Sort of like self-defamation to humble myself before older irc cats.

The beauty of irc to me was in part its whimsical nature. Making up words was something that happened almost every day and no one batted an eye.

Also trolling was part of this whole scene and no one cared. Everyone knew how to handle trolls and if you didn't you were part of todays entertainment.

Today it's all bullying and people are going insane over trolling but back then it was just part of the game.

IRC was truly where culture existed in my opinion. After newsgroups and such, IRC was live. It happened every day, all day. And night. In that sense it would be a much better source for slang terms than zines.

[Sendotsh]

It was absolutely in use on IRC in the mid 90s or earlier.

We used it plenty to diss the kids pingflooding their school then saying they hacked it, or using winnuke or Back Orifice (manually, by installing the client themselves) on a friend.

If you used a downloaded tool without any interest in how or why it worked, you were a script kiddy. There wasn’t really a definition or anything, you just knew.. the person was leet, or they were a skid.

Searching for the term probably won’t help much though as we bastardised as much text as possible back then. 5cr1p7 k1ddy, sk1d, skiddy, scriptkid, skript kiddy.. it was essentially a sport to make your text as illegible as possible while still being able to understand each other. A form of slang I guess.

[codetrotter]

> it was essentially a sport to make your text as illegible as possible while still being able to understand each other

: 50|27 0|= |\/|:55 7y|*:|\|6 1:|<3 7|-|:5 |3|_|7 47 73|-| 54|\/|3 7:|\/|3 : [)0|\|7 |\/|:55 :7 47 411

[madsmith]

God that took me five minutes to parse... but after you wrap your head around it, it’s not so bad.

I imagine it was easier to parse out in a monospaced terminal’s font?

[intothemild]

It's so dumb we used to think of this as a form of securing our chat...

At least mum and dad couldn't read it.

[luckman212]

"I sort of miss typing like this but at the[teh?] same time I don't miss it at all"

[phaemon]

Searching should work as long as you're happy to kiboze with:

grep -E '(5|s)((c|k)r?(i|1)(p)(t|7))?( ?)(k)(1|i)(d*)(y?)(i|1)?(e)?'

...or similar.

[pbhjpbhj]

FWIW I did

    grep -riE '(5|s)(c|k)r?(i|1)(p)(t|7)( ?)(k)(1|i)(d{2,3})(y?|(i|1)?(e)?)' ./b/tmp/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-archive/

and got no hits (your original hits lots of usage of "skidding"). Source of that archive is archive.org - https://archive.org/details/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-archive.

There are a lot of hits on "kiddies" in comp usenet groups. For example:

    From: [e-mail]
    Newsgroups: mod.computers.vax
    Subject: how to stomp on your kiddies
    Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
    Date: Thu, 15-May-86 16:48:00 EDT

but not "script kiddies". I think it's just used as a general term for uninitiated or novice computer users, especially from a sysadm persepective.

[thescriptkiddie]

FYI, "skidding" is short for "script kiddie-ing".

[pbhjpbhj]

Cool, none of the examples I noticed were referencing that AFAICouldT.

[Unknoob]

Thank you for reminding me how much I hate regex

[intothemild]

Yep, I was on IRC from about '93 onwards... I remember it from the mid-nineties, I can't lock down specifics, but I remember the computer I was using at the time.

Can confirm the word "skid" too, and searching for any of these words is going to be problematic with all the bullshit l3375p33k.. So good luck using a regex or text search

but yeah holy shit winnuke/back orifice... wow that takes me back!

[ganoushoreilly]

I remember a wave of people popping up in the late 90's when sub7 dropped, as a couple were embedding it in Scene rips and re-distributing them on efnet and dalnet warez channels. Spent a lot of time helping people remove it only for them to re-install with the next Photoshop crack.

[parliament32]

We called them "skids", so yeah lots of variations.

[spurgu]

> Today it's all bullying and people are going insane over trolling but back then it was just part of the game.

To be fair people were anonymous back then so trolling/bullying was easier to brush off.

[SmellyGeekBoy]

I've been on the internet since 1995, FWIW. My understanding of "trolling" at the time just meant deliberately saying stupid or obviously false stuff to get a rise out of people. It wasn't malicious, just a form of sport and when you realised you were on the receiving end often played along as a form of meta-trolling.

When I see "trolling" used to describe death threats or mocking someone's dead relatives on social media it just doesn't sit right with me. I guess language evolves but we already had perfectly good words like "harassment" and "bullying" to describe these activities. It really takes away from the light-hearted fun and games that the word used to embody.

[rootusrootus]

Maybe for the general population. For those of us deep into the early Internet, it wasn't all that anonymous and a lot of people absolutely took it personally. In many ways, due to the significantly smaller group of people, it was a lot worse if you found yourself on the wrong side of things.

It just didn't make the news or get talked about in school because regular folks had no idea what was going on.

[INTPenis]

True in the sense that a kid can't choose to go to another school the next day.

But online they can at least choose to not visit that group anymore.

But not in the sense that we weren't familiar with each other. We knew each other and there were power structures on IRC too where you looked up to certain people. So bullying could be pretty harsh coming from certain players.

Still though, you could just leave the channel. Today kids are using group chats with their neighbor and school chums. So it's a bit more difficult.

Back in my day it was rare to be on IRC with someone from your own town because internet was rare.

[TeMPOraL]

Depends. IME on IRC people usually were pseudonymous, not anonymous, and built reputations around their handles - reputations which sometimes were as important (or for us youngsters more important) than meatspace one.

[LiveOverflow]

Do you know where I could get old IRC logs? I was looking for some but couldn't find any. I guess most of them are not archived anywhere?

IRC logs of #hack etc. would be gold!

[BuildTheRobots]

It's a shame http://bash.org/ isn't datestamped.

[MentallyRetired]

Oh god, I hope not. My webarchived geocities from 1997 is cringy enough. I don't need to remember what I was saying on EFNet in 1993.