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Comment by jdmoreira | Hacker News Reader

This brings me many good memories of my script kiddie humble beginnings. It all started with backoriffice and mIrc and slowly it evolved to me wanting to run bitchX and eventually getting into linux. It probably took me an year to go from being a windows user to exclusively run Slackware and poring over Phrack :)

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Very much exactly my story! I also did mIRC scripting :)

Seeing the title of post I immediately felt sentimental. It so funny to understand actually understand that so many people were socialized with the same tools. I recently found the tools compilation CDs my brother used to assemble with all those tools. Having Back Orifice on a random computer on the internet was somehow the first feeling what the internet ment without knowing actually what to do with that. I additionally remember spending hours on SoftICE (My biggest success was to discover that the only license key to the Siemens webwasher adblocker was 'Mr Nuts'.) I wonder if is there similarly innocent things today's script kiddie's do.

I started programming with mIRC scripts too.

I fondly remember writing an anime news bot, that scraped a anime news site and spammed it into one of my channels.

I didn't know what HTTP, HTML, loops, or even arrays where. I copy-pasted everything from countless sources I found.

Good times.

I played with ircii scripting, one time I made a bot (probably copied some script from somewhere) that would op folks with a hardcoded irc usermask list.

I then ran one with just a mode that would op anybody upon joining and then when I'd run into folks who were all into bots, I was like "yeah I have one you can borrow for your channel," and then they'd invite it and op the thing, and then it would start opping everybody who joined and the prior owner of the channel would get all ornery about it.

lol irc was like the crackhouse of the internet to me.

mIRC scripting is why I'm a software developer today.

Asynchronous message based programming before it became hip. In an ungodly language nevertheless. :)

+1 to that.

mIRC was far more accessible to me than programming anything more simple than a text based adventure in BASIC. Then I got into Perl :D

Me too. Started writing bots that offer mIRC file downloads and then I had to learn Linux because that was what our only server had installed.

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