When people find out I'd been an active part of the hack/phreak scene, they usually have some questions. While my normal response is RTFM and Hackers references I guess it wouldn't kill me to write a few paragraphs with some reflection.
While I linked them jokingly, those above two links and numerous others were certainly well known in the community. Hackers - in the Hollywood sense of the word - are nothing if not self aware, and generally delighted in the electronic counter-culture. Even in the early 2000s the influence from '80s and '90s attitudes was heavy. We enjoyed it.
The sense was that you belonged to a larger community, as anyone you asked would have an opinion about hat colors, hacker vs cracker, and all sorts of totally irrelevant jargon. It was a common bond, and the entire discussion would be confusing gibberish to an outsider. In what I still think was the best part of those groups, it's one of the only places I genuinely felt no one gave a fuck who you are. You could be in a mansion in Europe, a Baltimore slum, a shack in Tennessee, or with intermittent Internet in Madagascar - white, black, male, female, popular, a shut-in - even your name didn't matter, so long as you could hang with the discussion.
Don't get me wrong: I do mean hang. Lots of the forums or IRC would be relatively friendly, in that the majority of people hanging out were there to relax, share, and geek out, but that was a thin veneer over the hell that you could unleash by irritating the wrong person. Usually people would be pleasant (as much as you can expect, there's always an ass around), but when you were new you had virtually no respect. You had to earn it by answering questions, being entertaining, making cool things, sharing something rare - no free rides. This definitely led to cliques and personality clashes, but once you got welcomed into a group or community, there was a sense of shared competence and experience that's hard to create any other way.
And I think that was what kept a lot of us around. You had a wide variety of people, interested in technology and seeing how things work, all supporting each other. You needed a thick skin, for sure, but you also learned to appreciate purely intellectual relationships. The only communication we had was through text, often public (in some cases with hundreds or thousands of onlookers), so you learned rhetoric. You got used to reading sarcasm, intimating a personality type from a few paragraphs, and realized that guy who called you a "smoldering jackass" also took the time to direct you to a relevant RFC, so who cares if he's in a bad mood.
The other thing is that I think most of us didn't know many people with those shared interests in real life. Naturally those of us who skewed towards the security fields liked to push rules and see what we could get away with, which alienated some, and would often spend hours pouring over source code to figure out why something crashed when we pushed a certain combination of buttons, which bored others. That shades-of-grey morality and obsessive focus is probably over-represented in most scientific fields, but finding someone near you with the same interests was hard. Also, when you got into the not-an-experiment-no-way-this-is-legal territory, you preferred the anonymity of the Internet crowd.
So as tame as it sounds, that was mostly it. We read a lot, wrote a lot, joked & exaggerated, and had fun treating the digital world (and often the meatspace surrounding it) as a playground. The hardest part was putting in the time studying and contributing to be respected and taken seriously. I made a lot of friends and found a lifetime interest in security, code, and teaching; I certainly don't regret it.
I hope there's still some small corners of the Internet that keep that small-town, wild west feeling alive and make newbies earn their seat in the community.
As always, hope that was interesting or helpful, feel free to drop me a line if you have any comments or questions.