Sending the `/list` command in chat would result in one or more emails with lists of software, usually split up to reduce file size. If I were looking for PhotoShop, I might see something like:
[400] PhotoShop 4.0 (cracked by Foo) 1/4
[401] PhotoShop 4.0 (cracked by Foo) 2/4
[402] PhotoShop 4.0 (cracked by Foo) 3/4
[403] PhotoShop 4.0 (cracked by Foo) 4/4
I'd then send `/send 400-403` in the chat and in a few minutes I'd have four forwarded emails containing a portion of an archive. You'd do this for a bunch of stuff and then when going to bed, let AOL's download manager download everything overnight. AOL did more for the WaReZ scene than anyone else in the mid-to-late 90s.
_,-^-,_,-^-,_,-^ Enter 33 for /\/\ /\/\ ^-,_,-^-,_,-^-,_,-^-,_
(You'd type "33" in the chat to get a Mass Mail in your inbox.)
_,-*^*-,_,-*^*-,_,-*^ Enter 33 for /\/\ /\/\ ^*-,_,-*^*-,_,-*^*-,_,-*^*-,_Ah, the good old days.
If it wasn’t a “non”(a cc never used at AOL before) it was low value, credit cards were a dime a dozen back then. Only Nons were really high value to ao-hackers. Or cards with the bank phone number, from the back of the card, so you could find out how much available credit they had.
I won’t say how I learned this, but maybe the context clues will fill you in on how it ended when six months into discovering the internet for the first time, my family got a visit from the local PD and some gentlemen from “a government office down state”.
I was 13 at the time. Not much came out it but some very strong words from a local magistrate, who ultimately showed clemency and dropped the affair with orders that I remain “off the web” for a year.
My father on the other hand…was not so eager to let that one go, heh.
Went home and war dialed that local prefix (next city over) until I found the carrier number.
I was 14 and it was 25 years ago
All of the Toledo numbers were constantly busy, so I tried other "local" numbers and ended up discovering that the Findlay number would usually answer. I set that as the default and thought nothing more of it, while all of us used it for hours a day.
The phone bill that arrived at the end of the month was quite large.
Same thing happened to a friend. After that, I got into music and developed a more "healthy" approach to the internet... using it to learn about synthesizers and download the occasional cracked plugin.
But occasionally you'd find someone who left behind their Visa or Mastercard number.
I know this because of the late charges I incurred due to a typo on the account number that the system accepted.
I quickly found a fake CC generator and updated the CC. I was panicked for about a week..but he never found out. It never hit his CC, and then I was changing the CC every couple of weeks whenever I got a warning.
* yes, porn
Also, irc and newsgroups were amazing back then. I was just talking with some friends in discord about our days with mIRC scripts, in particular Invision 2 and Excursion.
I feel like AOL scripting was this weird subculture of teenagers who did VB vs the slightly older generation with their perl / C and Linux tinkering. I didn’t personally get into FreeBSD until FreeBSD 4, and I felt kinda late to the party. This was around the time, for me, when Knoppix was cool and the world outside of Windows felt magical.
Now, two decades later, instead of being some FSF dreamscape, sleep states and hybrid graphics on laptops cause problems across Win, Mac, and Linux, haha.
The Debian CD's came with a huge chunk of geeky/nerd stuff from that subculture, such as IRC bots, Anarchist FAQ, geekcode, the Linux Gazette...
Instead of this bot driven email, I made use of the alt.binary.mac.applications and similar newsgroups.
But this email system you describe sounds exactly AOLish version of newsgroups. A way of holding someone's hand while the powerusers just went straight to the source.
In the US, one of the key things that Prodigy (remember them?), AOL and some other providers had was that they had a lot of "local" phone numbers instead of "long distance". This meant that your connection was a single charge and didn't rack up with time. That was a BIG deal.
In addition, email addresses were still sufficiently uncommon and hard enough to get hold of that people were using "unmentionable" means to get them even up to about 1994 or so.
To get on the actual internet, you had to wardial the telephone exchanges and happen to luck upon an unsecured university dialin server, from which, if you had a printout of IP addresses from a book or BBS, you could telenet to other servers to use gopher, ftp, irc, MUDs, etc. All plain text mode of course.
AOL on the other hand was a lot more user friendly and lively, just dialin with a graphical interface and tons of groups, chat channels, games, etc. just right there.
It wasn't until the internet was finally opened up to the public in the late 90s that AOL added an abstraction layer over the internet. Even then, it likely had all types of modem available, where, for instance, I tried IBM's ISP but it used modems that were incompatible with the modem that came installed in my IBM PC.
Oh yeah, I remember sometime in the 90s talking to a Dutch guy that had a 6/6 SDSL connection and ran a server in their own home. I thought he must have been a billionaire but was blown away to discover they worked on assembly line.
I never really figured that every hour spent messing with all that would translate into so much more value than any of my school work. The scope of our computer courses at school was basically touch typing and MS Office 97/98.
I feel like I went on a similar journey to you. I wouldn't be where I am today without that beginning.
It was truly a lit time when you could control browser window size and position on the desktop from within JS, even eject the CD ROM! Free cup holder JS jokes freaked out the older folks. So good.
A lot of the fileserve bots on IRC were hosted on rooted international and .edu boxen.
So essentially we should thank all the inexperienced Linux admins of the early 90s for having so many easy to compromise machines on unmonitored networks and then forgetting about them. ;)
AOL OH accounts with no rate limits on chat sends, were the most fun. You could essentially dos whole rooms offline. calling AOL to get mail rate limits lifted was always fun too, explaining why you needed unlimited sending throughout. It was also interesting how many AOL employees were in on the game too, specially once people started paying for names.
Does anyone know what happened to gosh(utoh) ?
Similar to IRC channels with bots that provided lists of available content and used DCC to transfer compressed files in small chunks -- these were still the days of 9600-56k, so transfers larger than floppies were often doomed to fail -- AOL private rooms would be filled with bots that would respond to requests and send files. The difference being that the AOL bots would email a list of available content, which could be a paginated list across multiple emails, or results for a specific search query. Then you would type another command into the chat to request a specific file or release, and the bot would forward you a series of emails with <1.4MB attachments (the maximum size at the time), already stored on AOL servers and ready to download at whatever speed your modem could handle.
It took AOL a long time to catch on to this, and even then, they couldn't keep up with the sheer number of fake accounts being created -- or, as the article points out, accounts made with phished credit cards, of which there were hundreds of thousands floating around and a never-ending supply of new ones as AOL's userbase grew. They effectively hosted the warez scene throughout the 90s, until residential broadband became available and 10-100mbps was common in places like Sweden and Singapore, at which point the scene shifted to IRC and self-hosted top sites (i.e. private FTPs).
It was a remarkably simple solution to a hosting problem, and the folks who organized it all will never get enough credit for their contribution toward creating a generation of graphics experts, for example, who couldn't afford the crazy prices of Photoshop or 3ds Max, but were able to use pirated copies to develop those skills and turn them into careers.