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Comment by marpstar | Hacker News Reader

On AOL we called it "punting", and the apps that facilitated it were the first reason I ever wanted to code.

Strange nostalgic memories of "AOHell" and "LuciferX" come to mind... If I remember, a lot of them were visual basic apps that would use SendKeys() to control AOL via keyboard shortcuts. A little like the wild west back then...

Anyone recall the "SubZer0" proggie? (and who else recalls calling apps "proggies" in our kitchy chat rooms?)

I recall a few, FaTe, AoLazy, and others being shared in island55. Also memories of Master AOL & Internal/Overhead accounts that allowed infinite scrolling in chat.

I remember Sub-7 and its modules, including those that forced the user to play (and win) a game of tic-tac-toe, could melt the screen, flip the screen upside down and misc destructive things.

Man, I wish I knew what I was doing back then. Major service providers allowing unsanitized inputs like that? Sounds like a lot of low hanging fruit! And this was before blogging was popular so communicating advanced techniques wasn't as easy back then either.

Those must've been some scary code bases.

Ditto. I got into VB because of this "exploit," and that kicked off my inadvertent career choice. Punters were all the rage.

By the time AOL 3.0 rolled around, it wasn't bluescreening the machine, rather just ending the AOL process and disconnecting.

I downloaded VB4 from an AOL mail server when I was 11. I made the mistake of forwarding the email, which AOL considered making a pirated copy of the software. Came home from school the next day and our AOL account was terminated.

my little secret to not getting punted on aol was to remove the aolrich.dll which was responsible for parsing all the html the client received. those were great days!

Not to beat my own drum but I did not agree with the ethics of booting, and while I was too lazy to code back then, I rooted for defensive apps that armored you against getting booted :D. Yahelite on Yahoo was the best.

Same, this is how I got started with coding as a teenager.

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