AIM was where I first found my passion for development. The first programming language I ever really learned, perl, was because I wanted to be better at making AIM bots.

Nostalgia:

- The TOC protocol and the OSCAR protocol. Net::AIM and Net::OSCAR. Aryeh Goldsmith, you beautiful soul.

- The first $300 I ever made online was in ~2002, when I wrote a chatroom flirt bot for an adult content affiliate. I was 14 or 15 years old.

- The first project I built that ever got traction was a bot that enabled offline messaging. I didn't even write it, it was open source, but I branded it well and it got traction and spread virally across the USA.

- Being part of the AIM scene...exploiting warn functionality (with parallel attacks!), profile vulns, and 3char screen names being the most legit.