The AOL Days
I was talking with a friend about the old AOL days, and he said how much he missed them. I didn’t understand what he meant. It was slow, it took forever to connect, and since you only had 30 hours to burn, your AOL bill grew slowly until it was a hundred dollars.
But as we talked, I realized what he was talking about. We talked of the old AOL days, circa version 2.5, and all the bad things people did when the words “network” and “security” were never even grouped together. People “phished” accounts, traded pirated material using AOL’s inboxes, used external programs to talk “leet” and gain access to features in AOL users weren’t meant to see, “punted” other users, used accounts with the words “AOL” in them (before AOL disallowed these accounts) to fool users into doing all kinds of things, used credit card generators to create fake accounts, etc. Wow, great times. He says he has most of the old programs on a CD somewhere. It would be great to put all of that stuff up somewhere with screenshots, as a little stroll down memory lane.