• lackthought@lemmy.sdf.orgOPM
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    1 year ago

    I was an annoying little shit back in the day so of course I thought Punters were the coolest thing around
    I would terrorize people in AOL chat rooms by kicking them offline with IM spam, or sending obnoxious ASCII art into the chat

    these programs did influence me in a positive way though

    I learned to code by downloading some early version of Visual Basic retrieved from an MMer in chat on my painfully slow 2400 baud modem
    I then ended up creating my own rudimentary proggies
    Like one that would target a chat room user and immediately mirror any comment they made, bewildering the unsuspecting person and offering myself much entertainment

    So thank you to AOL Punters/Proggies for setting me on my current career path, even though it began as a pre-pubescent online terrorist (I called myself MoNeYmAsTa, lol)

    • Gashole711@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      This is how I learned Visual Basic. I wanted to create these things. I taught myself subclassing and it sent me down my career path. This was a really fun time of the internet.

    • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      I have a similar story, except for me it was Yahoo! Chat. Got a hold of VB, and started making chat bots, brute dictionary “tools”, etc. I managed to produce a few that were fairly popular in the scene.

      • lackthought@lemmy.sdf.orgOPM
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        1 year ago

        oh yeah I spent a fair amount of time on Yahoo!, mostly the game rooms

        Yahoo! Pool was peak multiplayer gaming back in the day!