I was also born a bit too late but I was active on IRC during the last 3 years of the 90s and remember the term script kiddie being so much a part of the fabric of IRC that we had already started to type around it, so to speak.
For example instead of saying script kiddies I'd just call myself a kid and it would be implied. Sort of like self-defamation to humble myself before older irc cats.
The beauty of irc to me was in part its whimsical nature. Making up words was something that happened almost every day and no one batted an eye.
Also trolling was part of this whole scene and no one cared. Everyone knew how to handle trolls and if you didn't you were part of todays entertainment.
Today it's all bullying and people are going insane over trolling but back then it was just part of the game.
IRC was truly where culture existed in my opinion. After newsgroups and such, IRC was live. It happened every day, all day. And night. In that sense it would be a much better source for slang terms than zines.
We used it plenty to diss the kids pingflooding their school then saying they hacked it, or using winnuke or Back Orifice (manually, by installing the client themselves) on a friend.
If you used a downloaded tool without any interest in how or why it worked, you were a script kiddy. There wasn’t really a definition or anything, you just knew.. the person was leet, or they were a skid.
Searching for the term probably won’t help much though as we bastardised as much text as possible back then. 5cr1p7 k1ddy, sk1d, skiddy, scriptkid, skript kiddy.. it was essentially a sport to make your text as illegible as possible while still being able to understand each other. A form of slang I guess.
: 50|27 0|= |\/|:55 7y|*:|\|6 1:|<3 7|-|:5 |3|_|7 47 73|-| 54|\/|3 7:|\/|3 : [)0|\|7 |\/|:55 :7 47 411
grep -E '(5|s)((c|k)r?(i|1)(p)(t|7))?( ?)(k)(1|i)(d*)(y?)(i|1)?(e)?'
...or similar.
Can confirm the word "skid" too, and searching for any of these words is going to be problematic with all the bullshit l3375p33k.. So good luck using a regex or text search
but yeah holy shit winnuke/back orifice... wow that takes me back!
To be fair people were anonymous back then so trolling/bullying was easier to brush off.
When I see "trolling" used to describe death threats or mocking someone's dead relatives on social media it just doesn't sit right with me. I guess language evolves but we already had perfectly good words like "harassment" and "bullying" to describe these activities. It really takes away from the light-hearted fun and games that the word used to embody.
It just didn't make the news or get talked about in school because regular folks had no idea what was going on.
But online they can at least choose to not visit that group anymore.
But not in the sense that we weren't familiar with each other. We knew each other and there were power structures on IRC too where you looked up to certain people. So bullying could be pretty harsh coming from certain players.
Still though, you could just leave the channel. Today kids are using group chats with their neighbor and school chums. So it's a bit more difficult.
Back in my day it was rare to be on IRC with someone from your own town because internet was rare.
IRC logs of #hack etc. would be gold!
It goes at least back to Pluvius (in, amongst other places, BoW) in 1994, but I'm pretty sure he didn't come up with it either --- BoW itself was an ironic commentary on the whole scene, and wrote casually about "scripts" because everyone knew what that word meant.
And so what's interesting isn't "script kiddie" --- "kiddie" has been an all-purpose pejorative since forever --- but "scripts", which have an interesting etymology that crosses over between IRC scripts and exploits. "Cookbook" used to be another related term which has fallen by the wayside.
"Zero day" is another term with interesting roots, originally referring not to vulnerabilities and exploits but to pirated games; there was a whole "days"-denominated scale for freshness of warez.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ypw59y/a-brief-look-back-...
Wow, wait til they find out how many of the things on Mr. Robot are already things in general. That's kind of what made the show good in the first place - that it had relatively realistic descriptions (amongst the theatre, of course) of how to break into computers.
It was the gateway drug from amiga vid mod devs into hacking but rather than the hard way (learn to code) they bootstrapped in from somebody elses script.
Timeline is generally about the same time as well.
Due to the time-frame and the crowd I hung out with at the time, i can definitively say that was between '94 and '97.
I would find it very hard to believe that Australian high schoolers were at the bleeding-edge however, no matter how advanced we were, which tells me the real origin of the term must be significantly earlier than that...
Very few people with full time jobs had the time to be super active in the 'scene'. It was almost entirely highschool and college students.
https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/net/hack.board.txt
>FROM>: MAD MAN HACKER
>DATE>: WED JUN 26 <34710>
HEY,DUDES TRY THIS VAX COMPUTER->202-xxx-yyyy JUST HIT CONTROL-CHARA AND YOUR
PRO. GET SOMEWHERE...WELL,LATRE DUDES...
/\>>MAD MAN HACKER.."And you'll know you are vastly better than the "code kiddies" who go to places like the Scriptors of Doom website to pick up programs (e.g. Perl scripts) to use to break into people's computers." (Meinel, 1996 [1])
I couldn't quickly find the Scriptors of Doom website to check there.
They say in the OP that Wikipedia has 2000 as the earliest use, but Slashdot has use a few times in 1999 eg [2] ... perhaps the people writing Wikipedia hadn't heard of /.
[1] http://verbosity.wiw.org/issue6/meinel.html
[2] https://ask.slashdot.org/story/99/06/05/1815225/ask-slashdot...
Maybe I'll dig into some of my old HackTic magazines to see if they mention it anywhere, but I don't think they did. I think I encountered it online on usenet somewhere, which suggests its use was already pretty mainstream at the time.
Of course I suppose it depends entirely on the specific chat moderator behind the report...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOHell
I think the author of the article is misidentifying the intent of the term though. Script kiddie has come to mean a person who is enabled by a tool or interface that allows them to carry out a dangerous or damaging attack on a computer system while having no knowledge about how to accomplish this attack via their own means.
I think in the context of the article the "original sources" are moreso espousing a bit of a programming elitism. Similar ideas but different spirits of the word.
the origin of 0-day (zero-day): http://bjorn.kuiper.nu/2013/10/09/origin_of_zero_day/
curious to see if somebody knows (with proof) of an earlier reference..
On the other hand, going to eBay and searching Cisco 2501 is a bit depressing.