What hacking AOL taught a generation of programmers

Re:What hacking AOL taught a generation of programmers by ilrwbwrkhv on Tuesday April 12, 2022 @10:44AM (#31003429)

This naughtiness is what's missing now with the general public in the programming world. It has its pros and cons but man those days were so much fun.

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Re:What hacking AOL taught a generation of programmers by seanp2k2 on Tuesday April 12, 2022 @04:31PM (#31007894)

Yeah; GitHub is orders of magnitude better than Planet Source Code ever was, but the high of posting your sick new vb5 BAS with “A+++++++++” in the title and getting all the gloves isn’t really the same today.

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.

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Re:What hacking AOL taught a generation of programmers by ilrwbwrkhv on Tuesday April 12, 2022 @05:16PM (#31008319)

My only fear is maybe our generation of hackers are old now and cryptocurrency is the place where the naughtiness is happening and we don't take it seriously because we are older.

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Re:What hacking AOL taught a generation of programmers by anthk on Wednesday April 13, 2022 @03:32AM (#31012073)

Perl was still used on Knoppix/Debian Woody days.

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...

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