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The idea of abbreviated speech pretty much goes all the way back to the first networked computers in the 60's, when data transmission rates were so low that any attempts to shorten words were eagerly grabbed onto. @ as "At" evolved during this time, "b" for "be", etc.
In the 80's very few people used the Internet, and almost no hackers did (it was heavily monitored by academia and the .mil guys back then, and there was little anonymity), so BBS's became incredibly popular among the digerati. In the era before caller ID, there was no way to tell if an incoming BBS call was from the kid down the street or an FBI agent in Washington, so BBS operators did their thing in a state of perpetual paranoia. They were terrified that they were going to get raided and their equipment taken. Since computers hadn't yet penetrated the mainstream, the raids that happened never made the press, the rights abuses that went on were ignored by just about everybody, and the FBI under the Reagan administration had free reign to do whatever it wanted in a digitally paranoid nation. I personally knew one guy who had the FBI raid his house on the ACCUSATION that he had pirated games on his WildCat box. Even though the claim was bogus and he was never prosecuted, he didn't get his hardware back for nearly two years, and most of it was broken when it was returned. That's how the fibbies worked back then...they didn't have to actually convict you of anything, they just grabbed your equipment as "evidence" and held onto it for years to shut you down (if you didn't get your lawyers after them, you sometimes didn't get it back at all).
There was also a well known case among technophiles about that time where a pair of California BBS operators were arrested, transported to Tennessee, and imprisoned for transmitting lewd materials over a state line. It was legal in California, but not in Kentucky, and the pair went to prison for it.
The thing was, the FBI and anti-porn vigilantes typically used automated search applications. They would dial in to a BBS, run their automated search, and log off. If they came up with keywords like "games", "pirate", or "porn", they'd look again with real human eyes to see if there was anything interesting. To combat this, porn became "pr0n", hackers became "haxors", etc. If you didn't trip their automated searches, they generally left you alone.
But the biggest evolution came with the advent of online gaming. Words like l33t, ph33r, rox0rz, etc were never used in the BBS days, and were mostly invented by n00bz trying to act cool :) When I began playing the original Quake after its release back in 1996, we called newbies newbies (or nubies, either way it's a shortening of "new boys"). The word n00bz didn't show up for a few more years.
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