AOL was like "The Matrix". The system was full of casual, blissfully ignorant users... meanwhile there was an underground set of hackers and script kiddies having a blast while being chased down by moderators.
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_.
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...
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).
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 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.
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.
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_.