In the beginning, there was a hat factory.

Factory is probably too grand a word for it, but the space that would eventually become the first home of L0pht Heavy Industries began as the location of a hat-making business. The second-floor spot in a building in Boston's South End was where the wives of two of the L0pht founders spent their days making and selling hats. Soon, it would be the workspace of some of the top white hat hackers on the planet.

In 1992, the hacker scene in Boston was thriving. The city, along with Cambridge, its funkier neighbor across the river, had been ground zero for many of the technologies and companies that helped lay the foundation of the Internet in the 1970s and 1980s, and as the 1990s dawned, a new generation of free thinkers, coders, tinkerers, and engineers was emerging. This was the first generation with easy access to personal computers and many of the people who emerged from the Boston scene had spent their formative years teaching themselves how to write code and taking apart early IBM PCs, Apple Macintoshes, VAX machines, and whatever other hardware they could get their hands on.

With the web still several years away from taking over, hackers and hobbyists relied on BBS boards for communication and to trade tools, techniques, and information. It was on boards such as The Works that some of the key figures in the Boston scene first came together. Later, the local 2600 meetings became the center of gravity for much of the community, which was growing quickly by the early 1990s. The meetings brought together the disparate threads of the community: professional coders, engineers, self-taught developers, hackers, college students, and even some high school kids.

Out of that mix emerged a small, loosely connected group of hackers that would help shape the future of the hacker scene and go on to define the security industry as we know it today. Over time, the group included Count Zero, White Knight, Brian Oblivion, Golgo 13, Weld Pond, Silicosis, Space Rogue, Kingpin, Mudge, John Tan, Dildog, and Stefan Von Neumann.

That group became known as the L0pht, one of the more influential hacker crews of the last 25 years. They were the varsity. And this is their story, in four parts.

(Read Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.)

Count Zero (John Lester): It started for me in high school when I got my first computer, which was an Atari 800. I couldn't afford an Apple IIe. That's what we had in the labs in high school. But I could afford an Atari 800, and I got a 300 baud modem. I wasn't really interested in programming, and I started calling bulletin board systems. I found a war dialer program that I think I copied, and then modified it. I could do a little programming, but nothing really. It was more about modifying what we could find that someone else wrote. And I made this little war dialer modification, and so I was just like calling random numbers, seeing if I heard a dial tone, and found a bunch of bulletin boards.

Kingpin (Joe Grand): The Works had all those text files, and it was sort of hacker related, but it wasn't evil hacker related. So I think The Works is the spot. I was involved in Renegade Legion doing stuff before the L0pht. The Works was definitely the first meeting point.

Count Zero: And then on those bulletin boards, I found conversations between people going around different topics. And I was just fascinated by people talking about things, and the technology. So for me it was all about the computing technology, and how we can connect people to communicate with others around the world. And then I found lists of bulletin boards around the country on these local bulletin boards. That's how the network sort of expanded, right? When I got out of school I started working in a research laboratory at Mass General. And it was really then the late '80s early '90s that I was like living on my own, and so what did I do? I fired up my war dialer, and started calling numbers around Boston. And then I found The Works BBS.

White Knight: In 1982 or 1983 I traded some friend a bike frame for a Timex Sinclair 1000 that didn't have a power supply. I wound up finding one that would work and hooked it up to my TV and I got hooked on the notion of early personal computers and BASIC programming. My best friend, who lived next door, his dad actually worked for a government contractor and he had access to ARPANET. They had in their house a [DEC] VT52 terminal and he allowed us to explore ARPANET, and we would play games like Adventure and Zork. That eventually led to better computers and the blossoming BBS scene that was coming along.

Mudge (Peiter Zatko): I started in computers in probably about 1975. And that was with a Tektronix 4051 or a Sweet Pea 75, Southwest Technical Products. My father brought them home from work. He was working on projects for NASA. We actually have some of the first trajectories still on massive tapes from NASA calculations on these old probably Z80 systems or maybe even 8080. The challenge was, there wasn't any software at the time. You couldn't download anything. You couldn't buy anything. So my dad and I would start writing it all. He'd put me to sleep, literally, by reading me assembler manuals.

Weld Pond (Chris Wysopal): The Works was a place that a lot of hackers would log on. That's where I met Deth Veggie. That's where I met Brian Oblivion. The Works was pretty open. It was fairly public. Anyone could join. This is sort of what I learned. There are bulletin boards that screen people. Brian ran this bulletin board called Black Crawling Systems. He had better, more technical files on there that he didn't want everyone to see. He had to meet me in person, so I met him on The Works and we scheduled an in-person meeting. He's basically, "Why should I let you on my board?" I had to both have some skills that I was going to contribute, but then I had to also have some hacker cred.

Mudge: So, when I was choosing whether I was going to go to college for music or computers, because essentially I had dual tracked most of my life on both of those, I had a little run in with the government that kind of spooked me. Turned out to be nothing, because of course, I knew what the laws were and I didn't break any of them. So that skewed me towards music. I got my computer system, we'll just say back, when I was actually in college, and it was that Apple II Plus. So I had it, and somebody had taken the lowercase conversion chip set out. And so I didn't have any of my connections anymore. I hadn't been doing it for like a year and a half. I've just been doing pure music, hardcore. And I was like, "Okay." So I cobbled together a war dialer and I started scanning the Boston phone numbers for carriers. And one of the boards I found was The Works. So I log on. But what I forgot is everything I'm typing in is all caps. So here comes Mudge just like shouting at every single person.

Space Rogue (Cris Thomas): I went in the service after high school, got out of the service with the idea of going to college, but the GI Bill at the time is not the way it is now. And while I did make it to Boston University, I didn't really finish at Boston University. But in the meantime, I knew that I needed a computer to go to college, so I bought a Mac, and then I had a modem with it. And I was dialing around to various bulletin boards, and found the cool boards, if you will, which in Boston at the time was a board called The Works, which was run by a guy named Jason Scott. All the cool kids called The Works.