DEF CON XX: twenty years of hacker evolution

Jesse Hicks explores the past, present, and future of Def Con:

Twenty years ago, the world of consumer technology was a very different place. In the early 1990’s, cell phones were still expensive devices slowly making their way out of Gordon Gekko’s high-rise office and into the hands of well-heeled customers like, for example, Zach Morris. Phones with PDA functions existed, but the smartphone as we know it today remained a sci-fi dream. The internet was still a text-based affair of interest mainly to academics (there were no dot-coms), though the nascent World Wide Web had begun gathering momentum among early adopters. Connections were analog, with speeds measured in kilobytes. There were bulletin boards and IRC, CompuServe and AOL, FTP and Gopher, floppy discs and command lines. There was no residential broadband, no Google, no iPads, no everywhere Wi-Fi, and no ethereal “cloud.”