You want to go back to the old AO? Well lets start at the beginning of it all. A bit of history for those who don't know how the security/programming/underground scene came to be, also may be a little motivation for others

http://www.wbglinks.net/pages/reads/misc/history.html

Prologue: The Real Programmers

In the beginning, there were Real Programmers.

That's not what they called themselves. They didn't call themselves "hackers," either, or anything in particular; the sobriquet "Real Programmer" wasn't coined until after 1980. But from 1945 onward, the technology of computing attracted many of the world's brightest and most creative minds. From Eckert and Mauchly's ENIAC onward there was a more or less continuous and self-conscious technical culture of enthusiast programmers, people who built and played with software for fun.

The Real Programmers typically came out of engineering or physics backgrounds. They wore white socks and polyester shirts and ties and thick glasses and coded in machine language and assembler and FORTRAN and half a dozen ancient languages now forgotten. These were the hacker culture's precursors, the largely unsung protagonists of its prehistory.
wbglinks links to this page as "Hat History"