AOL proggies and punters - A neglected part of internet history - Plozee
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In the 1990s AOL surpassed its competitors CompuServe and Prodigy to become the most visited internet site/portal in the world. AOL CDs were distributed far and wide, some of which said once you tried it, you’d be a different person. They weren’t wrong. By the end of 1997, AOL had about 8 million users, and […]
  • @[email protected]OPM
    7•1 year ago

    I was an annoying little shit back in the day so of course I thought Punters were the coolest thing around
    I would terrorize people in AOL chat rooms by kicking them offline with IM spam, or sending obnoxious ASCII art into the chat

    these programs did influence me in a positive way though

    I learned to code by downloading some early version of Visual Basic retrieved from an MMer in chat on my painfully slow 2400 baud modem
    I then ended up creating my own rudimentary proggies
    Like one that would target a chat room user and immediately mirror any comment they made, bewildering the unsuspecting person and offering myself much entertainment

    So thank you to AOL Punters/Proggies for setting me on my current career path, even though it began as a pre-pubescent online terrorist (I called myself MoNeYmAsTa, lol)

    • @Gashole711English
      4•1 year ago

      This is how I learned Visual Basic. I wanted to create these things. I taught myself subclassing and it sent me down my career path. This was a really fun time of the internet.

    • Dr. Wesker
      2•1 year ago

      I have a similar story, except for me it was Yahoo! Chat. Got a hold of VB, and started making chat bots, brute dictionary “tools”, etc. I managed to produce a few that were fairly popular in the scene.

      • @[email protected]OPM
        1•1 year ago

        oh yeah I spent a fair amount of time on Yahoo!, mostly the game rooms

        Yahoo! Pool was peak multiplayer gaming back in the day!

  • @baccano
    3•1 year ago

    Need to get those MMs of the latest WaReZ. I got a T1 FTP connect with DrinkOrDie, and chill with BoxingNun of UPS.

  • @[email protected]
    2•1 year ago

    There was a Mac client (AOL4Free, I think?) that worked by sending a token saying that the user was in a support session after each request. Support was free, so this eliminated billing charges beyond the monthly subscription. I read that it was the work of a college student. Made my life sweet at the time.

    Another memory of that time: PC users calling themselves “barcodes,” with names like IIIllIllI flooding our chats and running macros to harass Mac users. Stupid shit. Whatever. We had knock-off macros, but I don’t think we had an equivalent to AOHell.

    Also: Cheers to all who built a career on this hobby / fascination when we were kids and such. What a great outcome. “Say HERE to get added to my mass-mail of pirated material!”