Computing History | Sands Hotel — DEF CON Began as a One-Off Gathering

On Friday, July 9, 1993, people who had mostly known one another through bulletin-board systems began arriving at the Sands Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Jeff Moss, known online as The Dark Tangent, had booked the Burgundy Room for what was meant to be a one-time farewell gathering for a member of the Platinum Net network; the guest of honor left the country early, but the gathering went ahead.

The surviving [contemporaneous announcement](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SH3wDQD0SU) gives July 9–11 and explicitly identifies Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. A later DEF CON archive index says June 9–11, but those dates fell Wednesday through Friday; Moss’s own [first-person review](https://forum.defcon.org/node/196995) instead follows Friday arrivals, Saturday talks, and Sunday departures, so this memory uses the contemporaneous July date while preserving the discrepancy.

Around 110 people attended, according to Moss’s review. The room was informal—name tags, borrowed equipment, folding chairs, and conversations that continued beyond the scheduled talks—but its program already joined several strands that would define security culture: Unix administration, computer viruses, privacy, law, responsible conduct, and the relationship between technical communities and government investigators.

This was not yet a polished professional conference, and its importance does not rest on romanticizing unauthorized access. It mattered because people who had exchanged handles and messages remotely met face to face, argued about the social consequences of computing, and began turning a loose network into a recurring community.

[Wired’s later account](https://www.wired.com/2009/06/hacker-dark-tangent-joins-dhs-security-council/) described Moss launching DEF CON in 1993 to bring hacker friends together to trade skills; it also traced the conference’s evolution toward serious security research and a complicated relationship with federal agencies. A 2025 [Recorded Future News interview](https://therecord.media/jeff-moss-def-con-click-here) independently corroborates the farewell-party origin, the Platinum Net connection, Las Vegas, and attendance of roughly one hundred.

The Sands closed in 1996 and was demolished; the Venetian now occupies the former property at 3355 South Las Vegas Boulevard. The pin marks the documented Sands site, not a modern DEF CON venue.

Image: Desert Supply Company, “The Sands Hotel and Casino in 1959,” public domain in the United States (pre-1978 publication without copyright notice), via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Sands_Hotel_and_Casino_in_1959.jpg).