AOL proggies and punters - A neglected part of internet history
AOL proggies and punters - A neglected part of internet history
In the 1990s AOL surpassed its competitors CompuServe and Prodigy to become the most visited internet site/portal in the world. AOL CDs were distributed far and wide, some of which said once you tried it, you’d be a different person. They weren’t wrong. By the end of 1997, AOL had about 8 million us...
You're viewing a single thread.
I was an annoying little shit back in the day so of course I thought Punters were the coolest thing around
I would terrorize people in AOL chat rooms by kicking them offline with IM spam, or sending obnoxious ASCII art into the chatthese programs did influence me in a positive way though
I learned to code by downloading some early version of Visual Basic retrieved from an MMer in chat on my painfully slow 2400 baud modem
I then ended up creating my own rudimentary proggies
Like one that would target a chat room user and immediately mirror any comment they made, bewildering the unsuspecting person and offering myself much entertainmentSo thank you to AOL Punters/Proggies for setting me on my current career path, even though it began as a pre-pubescent online terrorist (I called myself MoNeYmAsTa, lol)
This is how I learned Visual Basic. I wanted to create these things. I taught myself subclassing and it sent me down my career path. This was a really fun time of the internet.
I have a similar story, except for me it was Yahoo! Chat. Got a hold of VB, and started making chat bots, brute dictionary "tools", etc. I managed to produce a few that were fairly popular in the scene.
oh yeah I spent a fair amount of time on Yahoo!, mostly the game rooms
Yahoo! Pool was peak multiplayer gaming back in the day!