Hacker News Reader

Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

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_.

View on HN

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 just wrote about this. https://keeb.dev/2022/05/28/The-beginning/

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).

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.

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 am also old school AOLer who's curiosity in programming sparked by making 'progs'.

I also had the Mad Dog McCree CD-Rom as a kid on my Gateway 2000 Pentium 60mhz. Shooting up that stagecoach!

There might have been a lot of hydro/0's but your handle is very familiar. If you hung out in vb/4 in the 90s I am sure we crossed paths.

Thank you for sharing your story.

Nothing as elaborate as yours but my parents got that call too. I can't imagine an ISP calling anyone in 2022. Good guys, AOL

I’ll add here that my mother also received a call from AOL.

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.

I remember making 2500$ spamming porn links

Reply on news.ycombinator.com