Double unlock.

In the mid 2000’s, I moderated a domain name discussion forum in exchange for free hosting. “X forum posts per month = x gb of bandwidth”

My goal was to post enough for them to give me WHM access so I could try to resell it.

Those were the days.

Those were the days indeed. A big part for me is probably because I was a teen at the time with little responsibility, but getting to be a part of the wild west days of the internet was a magical experience.

Magical indeed!

I once mailed $70 cash (multiple months of allowance) to someone to code a MVP of something I wanted to build.

They ripped me off and disappeared.

And… that’s when I decided I needed to learn to code!

Somewhere out there is a developer telling this exact same story. ‘I once agreed to build an MVP for a kid who promised to mail me cash. Never showed up. And THAT’S when I decided to get a real job.’

Except I mailed the cash in advance! It’s okay, it was probably another 14 year old.

My parents were not happy when I told them I sent cash to a stranger. I remember having to do it in secret because they were very not okay with the idea that you can meet strangers online. Hah.

I think they're describing a scenario where the cash was stolen by a postal worker or for some other reason didn't make the full trip.

I once got half a bitcoin on IRC for coding up a website scraper.

In my case, ignorance unlocked. I never heard of tk and I remember 36k modems so old enough.

I think reason is I went to work, slung .NET and didn't think much about computers otherwise except occasional reading some C++ books for "fun".

> In my case, ignorance unlocked. I never heard of tk and I remember 36k modems so old enough.

Might be too old then. I used my parents speedy ADSL modem (4mbit/s down, 1mbit/s up) :D

Probably: I similarly go back to 2400bps modems (9600 and 14400 when dial-up internet showed up here — 33.6k was the time of soft/winmodems other than the ultra expensive US Robotics ;)), and I skipped the .tk domains too — probably already employed and in possession of 10 .org/.net domains by then.