There's a Facebook group for you if this triggers the warm fuzzies: https://www.facebook.com/groups/297526060414740/
I also got started in programming during the "AOL Prog" era. Good times.
History of AOL Warez
71–80 of 142 posts
Re: History of AOL Warez
#72It was magic seeing all this on AOL as a kid. Free programs? AOHell, Fate X, proggies, I had to learn how these "gods" did all this. I warez'd VB and the rest is history.
Looks like I'm in good company.
Re: History of AOL Warez
#73It was magic seeing all this on AOL as a kid. Free programs? AOHell, Fate X, proggies, I had to learn how these "gods" did all this. I warez'd VB and the rest is history. Looks like I'm in good company.
All this makes me wonder what will inspire the current school generation to get into computing.
Re: History of AOL Warez
#74People don’t even know. Macfilez, zelifcam, spending hours busting into rooms and convincing mass mail bots to send you email and downloading 3D studio max, maya, photoshop (100s of mb) in 1.4 mb mass mail chunks, building programs in OneClick on your Mac to write l33t text and bust into rooms, the AOL keyword “green”... those were the glory days. It made no sense, it was amazing.
we most likely know each other.. 2.7 for life.
Re: History of AOL Warez
#75I 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.
Used to sign up for AOL using a credit card generator: Probably one of the ones here: http://cd.textfiles.com/hackersencyc/PROGRAMS/FILES.HTM
Ditto. "CardMaster" (or something like that) allowed me to get online for quite a while.
Re: History of AOL Warez
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
> … I never had a subscription to AOL, I would just use another '30 days free AOL' CD… There was a modified version of the client app call AOL4Free that bypassed billing on the Mac. Monthly charge for the account, but unlimited use. I believe I read that it was generated built a college student.
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…
Same. But I got my parents account banned for phishing OH accounts on sub-account. Those were the days.
Re: History of AOL Warez
#77Mac users had the privilege of a less-popular platform, Hotline -- see an article on it here https://www.macworld.com/article/2031816/hotline-revisited.h...
Hotline was THE shit. I ran my own server and tracker at some point.
Re: History of AOL Warez
#78Not AOL but
/ctcp username ping +++ATH0
(Forgive me if I've gotten the syntax wrong, it's been a long time.)
Re: History of AOL Warez
#79Can someone with knowledge of all of these early programs explained how they worked? I remember getting booted from rooms (and offline) all of the time during this period. It seemed like the Wild West, where all of these outlaws were above the law. It was glorious even though I was constantly in fear of being “punted”.
Now as a technical adult I’m very curious how they could do it. Did they send a certain “magic” byte sequence to my username? Did they overload it somehow? I can still vividly recall an IM with a stream of sinister ASCII and suddenly poof! Offline!
Re: History of AOL Warez
#80Back in the day we used to called people lamers. Damn i feel like grandpa Simpson, and i'm only 35