91–100 of 142 posts
It 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.
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IRC was such an interesting place - vast with a ton of different niches. I spent a whole summer downloading and burning dreamcast games - to a 14 year old it felt like I'd won the lottery. All of my gaming friends hung out on IRC as well, on top of stuff like cracked passwords for pay sites , software, and just all the weird niche hangouts like the phreaking channels. It was a great part of growing up, sometimes I'm…
IRC is still an interesting place! Even just on Freenode there are a bunch of good channels. It’s not the same as the 90s (before my time online) and 2000s, but I’ve made a few friends & good acquaintances on technical channels, many of whom I’ve even had the pleasure of meeting in person, since many of us live in the SF bay area.
This 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…
Ah, LightWave, where I first learned 3D modeling and VFX. By the way, the core group behind LightWave went on to make Modo, which is now my favorite package for modeling and baking.
Just the term "warez" elicits nostalgia, now add "couriers" and "BBS." Those were the days.
Another thing I happened upon recently was scene.org, pleasantly surprised it's still up. I first visited it back in '96, I think, it was one of the first sites I was eager to visit when I first got online (quite possible I was online as early as '93, but I can't be sure).
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IRC is still an interesting place! Even just on Freenode there are a bunch of good channels. It’s not the same as the 90s (before my time online) and 2000s, but I’ve made a few friends & good acquaintances on technical channels, many of whom I’ve even had the pleasure of meeting in person, since many of us live in the SF bay area.
freenode is definitely the useful network these days
#emacs is usually very helpful and friendly.
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Agh, I wish I could list off all the channels I was in without outing myself lol. Those were sick times. :) Best group of hackers I've ever met. Curious how many people still keep up with their old groups? Did any of you become lifelong friends?
I logged into a channel on Dalnet I used to frequent when I was 16 in 1998 recently. Some of the SAME people were there. Nearly 20 years later.
Super 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…
Definitely catalyzed my interest in engineering.
Can 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” byt…
I 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.