Numbers standing in for letters to evade filters and signal membership. Ended when your aunt's password was p4ssw0rd.
Cause of death is filed as “Mainstream absorption” and having watched it happen I would not change a word. It lasted 14 yrs, which is longer than most and shorter than it deserved.
I remember Leetspeak as the thing that made me realise other people were online at the same time as me. It was everywhere at once, on the same day, and that was new.
Two things are conflated in this entry: the term and the format. They have different birth years — the format is older — and the death dates differ by about a year. Splitting the record would fix half of the arguments below.
I would add a line to the headnote: the first documented use in BBS and warez scene, then hacker culture is the earliest surviving one, not the first one. These things are always older than the oldest screenshot.
For the record, the ironic use of Leetspeak and the sincere use overlapped for longer than people admit. There were years when you could not tell, and those were the good years.
You were there. What happened?
