Biggiesized -
This wasn't meant to be about the history of l337 speak, just about the LAZR and it's dated naming convention.
I believe the so-called leet speak form came out of early users of Unix, particularly those using the SCO flavor, but I'm sure each has their own version.
I remember when writing names in all lower case held a sense of pride because it meant that unix users recognized each other over the noise of the DOS newcomers to text based operating systems.
It carried over to IRC chat, then to IMing, then to texting... the form is pretty logical, just the use of shortcuts in language. I don't see it as anything diabolical as many do.
I think it's pretty funny to see it come full circle now to where we have major corporations copyrighting a dialect that was invented teenagers in the late 1970s and now using it for multi-million dollar marketing push.