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SendKeys() in VB powered basically all of the AOL chat bots in the 90’s.

It’s how I accidentally learned the Win32 API

Me too! With Sendkeys and some Win32 API calls, I wrote an AOL add-on (available through Keyword: addons) called AoLOL!. It was my first software business.

Q: How do you identify the AOL window? A: Look for an app with titlebar = "America[space][space]Online"

And BeOS/Haiku with the "Hey" command which does literally the same, but far more than key input. You can interact with widgets too. Under Unix, there's xdotool and friends.

I loved SendKeys()!

Used it to write programs that would run in the background & spook my friends by "typing" quotes from movies at random times on their computer.