Hah! I remember running decompilers (of questionable utility) on various VB-created progs so I could attempt to reverse engineer them.
It definitely got me interested in programming and the early-ish days of being apart of an internet community.
An embarrassing aside: my parents used to give me birthday and Christmas presents that was an allowance of AOL minutes.
Re:AOL Pretends to Be the Internet
by ShadowBanThis01 on Thursday September 07, 2023 @11:28AM
(#37420376)
More embarrassing: My parents still pay for AOL. $40 a month. My dad is convinced that he’ll lose the 20,000 E-mails he has there if they stop paying.
And he worked in IT his whole career.
Ahh good memories. This is how me and a friend got into programming. We would constantly feud though because he used VB, but I used delphi. Clearly, I was using the superior language :)
Aohell is what got me into Windows dev stuff back in the day. Then discovered the warez room. Downloaded a copy of VB 3.0 and bunch of other dev tools. I think Borland Delphi and also Power Builder. Best thing about AOL was that even in the mid-90s, their email system held what seemed like an unlimited amount of multi-part binary files as attachments. So when you requested a warez in the chatroom, your inbox got flooded with like 30-40 emails with rar file parts. Like pretty much everyone back in those days on dialup, I'd start the download at night , so less chance of someone picking up phone and disconnecting my session from AOL. When I was college, it got easier. Because AOL added TCP/Winsock support to their desktop client. So I could just install AOL on unsed Comp Sci lab PC and then download all the email attachments at 1-2mbps.
Me and my cousin created a yo momma joke spammer. I was a shit head back then, but it paid off being a nerd. But still, I did not learn about linux and free software until many years later because of AOL's shitty walled garden.