31337 is from bulletin board systems (BBSs) in the 1980s and early 1990s. It started from the hackers who were trying to participate in spurious activities. Many BBSs didn't want these things happening on their servers, so they would filter or ban people who talked about questionable topics. Most notably the word "hacker" became one of the "naughty" words. Rather than leave to more boring domains, they simply replaced "hacker" with a slightly different variation. ("hack0r", "h4cker", etc.) These got banned too, and then they would change the word more and more until it was barely recognizable. ("h4x0r", "|_|^><()|z") Eventually the system administrators realized that there was no way of banning words in a polymorphic language like Leet.
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Topic: ID 1337 (Read 13122 times)
