YES! AOL, where you could store tons of email and move it around without even downloading until you wanted it. Glorious days.
Of course, I was running Linux on a UMSDOS partition by the time I found out about it. :(
History of AOL Warez
51–60 of 142 posts
Re: History of AOL Warez
#52Ah, AOHell. I hung with the creator as a teenager on IRC. One day someone came into the channel and they were screaming and ranting because... they were logged into AOL as Steve Case. I didn't hop on to verify, but he was kick-banning moderators and generally abusing his power. We were highly amused.
[deleted]
Re: History of AOL Warez
#53Super nastolgic here. I learned programming via VB3 Writing apps to mess with AOL. First using "send keys", then switching to WinAPI. Made animated intros with Warezed version of 3d studio max. So many memories and hours spent! Friends made too but they all drifted away. Recently got nastolgic just seeing my buddy list when I logged into my AOL account from the 90s (after AOL shutdown was announced). Pretty much owe my career to the scene. Stay l33t!
Re: History of AOL Warez
#54This brings back so many memories... this is where I really started my "programming" with Visual Basic 4, hunting the web for .bas files that I could load into my own VB project to create 1337 rainbow text in my IMs, punting users, trying to work around the rate limiting that they added to chatrooms... it's incredible that the AOL warez scene is essential the catalyst for my now successful career in technology 20+ ye…
Me too, but for prodigy..
I did help a friend with his AOL app when they added a spce to the title and it broke sendkeys
Re: History of AOL Warez
#55Super nastolgic here. I learned programming via VB3 Writing apps to mess with AOL. First using "send keys", then switching to WinAPI. Made animated intros with Warezed version of 3d studio max. So many memories and hours spent! Friends made too but they all drifted away. Recently got nastolgic just seeing my buddy list when I logged into my AOL account from the 90s (after AOL shutdown was announced). Pretty much owe…
aol.bas
Re: History of AOL Warez
#56This brings back so many memories... this is where I really started my "programming" with Visual Basic 4, hunting the web for .bas files that I could load into my own VB project to create 1337 rainbow text in my IMs, punting users, trying to work around the rate limiting that they added to chatrooms... it's incredible that the AOL warez scene is essential the catalyst for my now successful career in technology 20+ ye…
Yep, same. My mother's best friend worked for MS at the time and brought me home VB4 in a giant box. Little did they know what I was up to (nothing too south of innocuous, I was mostly trying to spam render middle fingers in ASCII in AOL chatrooms)
Re: History of AOL Warez
#57If you find this stuff interesting, as I do, I would check out http://www.welcometothescene.com/ (Dead link). It was a web-series about the scene that was pretty much completely a screen recording of the "main character" which I don't think we ever see. The entire thing is watching chat logs and this person rip/upload movies and the like. I'm sure you can find a torrent kicking around out there of it (if you can't em…
Archived episodes: https://archive.org/search.php?query=welcome%20to%20the%20sc...
Thank you!
Re: History of AOL Warez
#58This did make me nostalgic. More so for the IRC Warez scene. Dalnet, Undernet, Effnet. I spent some time #3dwarez chatting with people sharing cracked copies of software. Many of the people worked in the industry but couldn't afford the 25K licence for personal use. So they traded it around. I was recently cleaning out some boxes of lost hardware. I kind of hoped I would find an old zip disk that had a copy of the 3D…
Efnet (Eris-free Network). I am not correcting because I am an asshole but because I think there is a notable difference in how people used to name things in 90s vs now.
Re: History of AOL Warez
#59I remember trying to write punters in VB, phishing bots, etc. I thought progs were the funniest things ever and I thought I was so clever because I never had a subscription to AOL, I would just use another '30 days free AOL' CD that I collected every time I went to the mall with my parents. I am happy I never did anything too stupid but from a CS perspective I learned a lot very quickly.
My friend in high school described how his VB punter worked as “it sends them a picture the size of Rhode Island.” I never figured out exactly what that means.
I think I remember that bug if you send an image with too large of a resolution it would crash the AOL app and therefore kick people off line.
Re: History of AOL Warez
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
We used to trade overhead accounts. Overhead accounts were subaccounts of AOL employees. There were different levels of administrative ability with different types of OH accounts. There was also an employee version of AOL that had special menus to perform administrative functions. For a while I had a L3 OH which let me create sub accounts under anyone's account without their knowledge, log any screen name off with th…
Really interesting. What's a "catcwatch" account?
CATwatch accounts were employees that specifically trolled around the system looking for problematic users and activity. Trying to get their accounts in trouble is like attempting to call the cops, on the cops themselves.