Dude, we got banned from AOL for life after I popped into a mod chat room and started pretending I was one of them. Stupid! But I wanted to play a dangerous game...
Re:AOL 3.0 reverse engineered
by nickstinemates on Sunday June 05, 2022 @01:33PM
(#31633081)
i just wrote about this. https://keeb.dev/2022/05/28/The-beginning/
Re:AOL 3.0 reverse engineered
by TedDoesntTalk on Sunday June 05, 2022 @03:23PM
(#31634037)
I’m sorry for your loss. I enjoyed reading this even though I am probably 15 years older, I have a similar story with the predecessors to AOL (BBS systems).
Re:AOL 3.0 reverse engineered
by nickstinemates on Sunday June 05, 2022 @05:11PM
(#31634900)
TY for the kind words. The end of this post took place in 1997 and while the effect still lingers, I can only be grateful that my outlet was productive.
Funny enough, AOL was the gateway drug. I found things like usenet, irc, and bbs's and graduated to these things. My early teens were spent in those neighborhoods before moving on to LAMP stacks and more productive programming.
I am also old school AOLer who's curiosity in programming sparked by making 'progs'.
I also had the Mad Dog McCree CD-Rom as a kid on my Gateway 2000 Pentium 60mhz. Shooting up that stagecoach!
Re:AOL 3.0 reverse engineered
by nickstinemates on Sunday June 05, 2022 @10:53PM
(#31636893)
There might have been a lot of hydro/0's but your handle is very familiar. If you hung out in vb/4 in the 90s I am sure we crossed paths.
Re:AOL 3.0 reverse engineered
by TedDoesntTalk on Sunday June 05, 2022 @03:25PM
(#31634053)
I had the privilege of dining with an ex-CEO of AOL around 2017 or so (long after his retirement). I was prepared to rail him for taking advantage of Americans, but he was such a humble and fascinating guy… no.
Thank you for sharing your story.
Nothing as elaborate as yours but my parents got that call too. I can't imagine an ISP calling anyone in 2022. Good guys, AOL
Re:AOL 3.0 reverse engineered
by freedomben on Monday June 06, 2022 @12:30PM
(#31642551)
Nowadays they send letters. Also being on the father end of it instead of the son is actually much worse, even though young me never would have believed that.
Re:AOL 3.0 reverse engineered
by mjthrowaway1 on Sunday June 05, 2022 @09:59PM
(#31636658)
I’ll add here that my mother also received a call from AOL.
Yep! I downloaded my first copy of Photoshop, along with the MacOS 8 beta from #macwarez/#macfilez. Around that time they got busted up and had to change to #zelifcam.
It was amazing. You'd just subscribe to some bot in the chat room and after that all the pirated software you could imagine would just continuously appear in your inbox.
Ah yes, I remember the first time I got my family's account shutdown for "punting" a moderator and crashing a bunch of servers. My dad was like "what?" when AOL _called us_.