by booleanbetrayal on 4/12/22, 12:48 PM with 196 comments
by bryans on 4/12/22, 1:35 PM
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.
by tppiotrowski on 4/12/22, 5:53 PM
by RexM on 4/12/22, 2:21 PM
These got me into programming and I made a couple of my own that are now completely lost to time.
ccoms (chat commands) were my favorite. The program would scan the chat and when you sent a command, it'd do whatever you asked and send a response back to the chat for everyone to see. Basically turning the AOL chat into a public command line. One of the more popular things people used it for was for playing pirated music. You'd send `play rammstein` to the chat, and it'd start playing a random Rammstein song from your mp3 collection.
I started writing one later[1], although I haven't touched it since 2016. It'd connect to your spotify account, instead.
Also, it seems Mark Zuckerberg was in the scene. He apparently wrote Darth Phader (a fader.) A fader would make your text in chats fade colors by injecting html to change the text color between each character. So, your text would start blue and fade to red further along in the message, then maybe go back to blue, it was all configurable in most of them.
Edit: I can't believe I left this out, but there's also a facebook group[2], Justin has a site with a lot of content about progs[3], and I recently stumbled on the AOL Underground Podcast[4].
[0]: https://progs.rexflex.net/
[1]: https://github.com/RexMorgan/qwik-tools
[2]: https://www.facebook.com/groups/297526060414740/
by _justinfunk on 4/12/22, 1:37 PM
However, I discovered that if you killed the NetZero application at just the right time (after connecting to the network but before the ad banner was initialized), you could stay online with no ad-banner and pwn some Zerg.
by throwaway787544 on 4/12/22, 1:22 PM
I've never forgotten how progz, Geocities, and MySpace all showed that people want to express their individuality and experiment if you give them the chance. But the boring commercialism of the 2010s internet killed the user's ability to be special.
by agotterer on 4/12/22, 4:09 PM
One day I asked my dad how they were made and he said he had some vague idea. So he took me to CompUSA and we left with a Learn Visual Basic in 24 hours book and Visual Basic software box. I went off and started writing my own programs and hanging out in various AOL related programming chat rooms. I made IRL friends from people that were part of that scene and that I met in those chat rooms. I have very fond memories of the internet back then.
I was 13 at the time I started coding AOL progz and went on to have a career in software development because of it.
by Duhck on 4/12/22, 3:43 PM
Everyone was anonymous, everyone was crazy motivated, and it was a wild west of credit card theft, software theft, and more.
I wrote a few prolific mass mailers and servers, was pretty well known in the scene, and was only 12/13 years old.
I learned to program, create great user experiences, and more.
My servers were the first to have plain text search: /server send photoshop instead of /server send 26-40
It also hosted the lists via a PHP webapp, tracked metrics on the web across users of the app, and connected to IRC.
It was a wonderful time of chaos, rapid learnings, and intrinsic motivation that shaped my life forever. If not for this period of time in my life, I dont know where Id find myself.
by qbasic_forever on 4/12/22, 3:26 PM
by turdnagel on 4/12/22, 1:23 PM
My fondest recollection was that there was a Pokemon battling type game (Pokemon Platinum, I think?) where you could battle Pokemon over chat. The creator had hard-coded his AOL username into the binary to unlock a bunch of moves and skills. We figured out you could load the binary into a hex editing app and change the screen name - only problem was, it had to be the same length as the creator's: 9 characters. So made a new screen name, the one that stuck with me for the next 10-15 years, so I could unlock some pointless features in an AOL program. But it introduced me to Visual Basic, hex editing, and generally being interested in tinkering with computers and software.
by todd3834 on 4/12/22, 2:09 PM
Learning Visual Basic and the open source community of .bas files was ahead of its time. The tutorials and programming guides, the general willingness to share information.
I learned how to write C++ from a random guy who went by LostSideDead. If you happen to be reading this sir, thank you for spending so much time teaching a kid how to write code. I’ve made a long career of it and I love it.
by bennyp101 on 4/12/22, 1:03 PM
Submitted it to “happy hacker” and it got in the newsletter, I was super chuffed as a 13? yr old!
Edit: I had a thing called “aol admin tools” which I have no idea if it was legit or not but could see lots more than I could normally lol
by jl2718 on 4/12/22, 6:55 PM
2. The anonymous or weakly pseudonymous internet was a superior user experience. It felt like an escape to freedom, similar to traveling to another country with chosen friends. The strong identity internet feels like surveillance more than escape. It leads me to believe that ‘the metaverse’ will always suck, not matter how good the technology gets.
3. What killed AOL? They had two separate generations of internet dominance, first the entire stack, and then with messenger after the ISP disruption. A company that can lead a massive growth industry, and then pivot to a successful product after their own disruption seems like a solid blue chip. I know what happened, they started focusing on old incompetent subscribers by giving them a familiar interface poorly replicated on the browser. But how? Who thought this was a good idea?
by benburton on 4/12/22, 1:17 PM
by valgaze on 4/12/22, 2:55 PM
I looked further and found each cipher was simply doing a
character offset, meaning each cipher was a Caesar Cipher.
The offsets were 70, 97, 116 and 101, respectively. If you
look up the corresponding ASCII code for those numbers, you
get the word “Fate”. I tried out this new decoding strategy
and was able to successfully decode a directory of MaGuS’
files. I had broken the code! MaGuS was using what is known
as the Vigenere Cipher, and for that particular directory,
“Fate” was the pass-phrase.by booleanbetrayal on 4/12/22, 1:35 PM
by ottoludd on 4/12/22, 2:16 PM
by 0xbadcafebee on 4/12/22, 4:59 PM
Joke's on them, though. I learned to teach myself everything (since they refused to), dropped out of school, and got a job at a start-up. Don't stay in school, kids - hack for fun and profit!
by bokohut on 4/12/22, 6:55 PM
by travisgriggs on 4/12/22, 4:51 PM
I wrote such a complicated program that I found out Bill Gates was wrong: 640K was not enough for everyone. But I realized that I could divide my mess of macros into categories, save them in separate files, and then selectively import only those that were being used at the time with a "root" set of macros. I was 18 or 19 at the time. It was many moons later when I learned about virtual memory and swap space, I realized I'd implement my own version of virtual memory/swap. In a very caveman like fashion. All without messing with someone else.
by derevaunseraun on 4/12/22, 3:49 PM
by Overtonwindow on 4/12/22, 1:03 PM
by robgibbons on 4/12/22, 3:22 PM
by tterrace on 4/12/22, 1:56 PM
Maybe I’m looking back with rose-colored glasses but I remember Visual Basic being intuitive and approachable for beginners in a way that I haven’t seen since.
The fader text is a nice touch too, that immediately makes me nostalgic.
by digitalsin on 4/12/22, 5:20 PM
What a great time :)
by beaker52 on 4/12/22, 4:37 PM
I wasn't knowledgeable enough to write the coms but I could make interfaces that called the functions within them. I made little apps that let you change the chat colours and phishing apps to message people so you could appear like an AOL staff member and maybe get their username and password.
Those same chatrooms are where I was exposed to pornography for the first time. My innocence never recovered from that, but it is what it is.
by treesknees on 4/12/22, 4:48 PM
I still have all of my source code. My only claim to fame was I wrote a program to automate the generation of ICQ accounts (which could login to AIM for botting, and were harder to ban since you couldn't setup a wildcard match for the screen names being all "random" numbers.) Apparently it was good enough that someone felt it was worth cracking my crappy copy protection.
by bluedino on 4/12/22, 1:32 PM
by oldstrangers on 4/12/22, 2:41 PM
by yarone on 4/12/22, 4:22 PM
My first commercial program (shareware) was a legit AOL add-on (AoLOL!). Designed, built, and redesigned several times before I had the courage to ship it. Visual Basic 3.0. Used Win32 API to attach my program to the AOL toolbar (for AOL 2.5 and AOL 3.0). Had folks from all around the country send me a $14.95 check via US mail.
by tmtnosce on 4/13/22, 6:46 AM
There were quite a few people who were interested in finding new methods used to brute force passwords as well as writing programs similar to what the article describes, good times
by gxqoz on 4/13/22, 3:42 PM
by ctvo on 4/12/22, 4:12 PM
It was a gateway for many of us into other distribution mediums for pirated software. I was part of that scene for years helping with various tasks as a teenager.
by mise_en_place on 4/12/22, 8:12 PM
by fsckboy on 4/13/22, 9:22 PM
"remember when everybody programmed in GW Basic?" no, that time never existed, but a certain set of people at a particular time in history got exposed to programming and that's what was available and understandable to them. In the fat part of the adoption curve for product lifecycles, that number of people can dwarf the number of pioneers who knew other languages like C, but their experience is not an accurate or detailed history of computer science.
AOL was a blip, a big, fat blip, whereby a certain generation of teens discovered computing, and while it was important personally to some people, in no way was AOL ever important, it was just froth.
by souptonuts on 4/16/22, 5:30 AM
by hfourm on 4/12/22, 1:15 PM
by 29athrowaway on 4/12/22, 10:43 PM
Then people pirated over phone, BBS, LAN parties, the Internet.
Shit, there might be even people pirating shit over Ham radio.
by elromulous on 4/12/22, 6:58 PM
by maram on 4/12/22, 5:05 PM
by GiorgioG on 4/12/22, 2:41 PM
by sejje on 4/12/22, 9:41 PM
Shout-outs to maxl, nion, frikk, fatmac, rikky, kai and oracle, syfa and some other good dudes from that time. Some of you are here, I know.
Can't believe we're talking about dos32.bas in 2022.
by purgedreality on 4/12/22, 5:19 PM
Fun memories. I still have copies of a lot of those .bas files with the original pinter/punter code. Did anyone ever actually get a rainman account?
by owlninja on 4/12/22, 1:38 PM
by lom on 4/12/22, 4:34 PM
by werber on 4/12/22, 5:11 PM
Tangent, I started work on remaking "You've Got Mail" a few months ago, with an updated ethos, focusing on decentralized web.
It's weird to cry over an article so unemotional, but, that era made me into who I am today.
by notadev on 4/12/22, 2:52 PM
Progz were mostly for annoyance and were either released as one purpose programs, such as a punter to boot people offline, or a fader to color text in chat when colors were introduced, or an OH Scroller that scrolled endless text to disrupt chat (you would run these on hacked overhead aka "OH" accounts used by staff that didn't get auto-booted for scrolling). Some progs were sort of All-In-One programs where they had maybe a punter feature, a fader feature, etc. These all in one progs usually had a bunch of useless stuff like an "echo bot" or "trivia bot" or whatever. Some had more nefarious purposes like termers which were used to get people's accounts terminated. Things like punters and termers were usually short-lived as AOL would catch on to whichever method they were using an patch it.
The article talks about the open-source sharing nature of progz, and maybe that was true for the folks who lived in the vb private chats or who released their BAS files (dos32.bas was my first ever intro to coding), but many in the hacker scene were typical teenage boys who would constantly try to one up each other and prove how leet or oldschool they were...and new methods weren't always widely shared. The biggest status symbols for AOL hackers were leet screen names, like "Boss" or "Hack". Even more leet were 3chars which were the smallest amount of characters in a screen name and thus hard to get. The leetest of all were restricted names that had banned words, like "FuckAOL" or were only 2chars like "DJ", or indents like " MrLeet" since they were seemingly impossible to make.
In order to get these screen names, hackers would find ways to steal account information to reset the passwords, or use tools like Sub7 to infect users and then steal their passwords. More technically savvy hackers would exploit holes in AOL's systems such as the "sign up" page which was the source of a really famous hack in 2000. Other hackers were adept at finding ways to convince AOL to terminate an account for supposed threats. Because of this, most AOL hackers had an extensive numbers of <>< or phished accounts to avoid a rival hacker from terming you "perm" account which was usually paid for by your parents. The term phish and its associated progz, phishers, phish tanks, etc., were actually coined on AOL.
Some guys from the scene are legendary. One guy who used AOL on a Mac would often find exploits only he could use, including one where he stole pretty much every 3char name available. Rumor has it he went on to create a very popular online game where users are slithering snakes. :-)
by chrisco255 on 4/12/22, 1:03 PM
by danb235 on 4/12/22, 3:33 PM
by ipaddr on 4/12/22, 2:24 PM
by nickstinemates on 4/12/22, 3:31 PM
by _0xdd on 4/15/22, 11:09 PM
$IM_OFF
by thenthenthen on 4/12/22, 4:43 PM
by balls187 on 4/12/22, 4:22 PM
by chrisallick on 4/12/22, 3:40 PM
by andrew_ on 4/12/22, 2:32 PM
by advectus on 4/13/22, 5:20 AM
by whatcd on 4/12/22, 4:17 PM