Originally posted by meddog
ok whats with the code?
It's 'leet', a substitution cipher that derives from the old dialup BBSes and chat hosts and their use of abbreviations like 'BCNU' for 'Be seeing you', 'ROFL' for 'rolling on the floor laughing', etc. The original purpose was to reduce the number of characters that were typed to speed communication in the days of 300-baud modems.
It blossomed more fully in the early 1980s as a way to obscure what you were typing from casual observers who were not part of the hacker community (in the original sense, not in the 'system cracker' sense). By substituting letters of similar shape -- '1' for 'l' or 'I', '3' for 'E', '5' for 'S', '4' for 'A', etc. -- it created text that was still readable to someone who was clued-in, but pretty much gibberish to a casual observer.
The use of leetspeak spread into the cracker and gaming communities, again as a mark of 'belonging' to the community. As its use spread, however, the people who'd originally created it as mostly a joke saw that the people who were adopting it were mostly lamers and wannabes, and stopped using it themselves. Leetspeak became the identifying mark of crackers, 'w4r3z d00dz', and gamers -- and generally indicative of the sub-sixteen-year-old twit with a computer, a network connection, and no sense.
Kevin's original comment 'translates' as "I'm just a leet (elite) hacker." My reply 'translates' as "Your hacker skills are no match for my leet sysadmin skillz, biznatch (squeak)."
