America Online

The Wild West of The World Wide Web

Public Chatrooms, Private Chatrooms, Keywords, and Phish. An ISP service that felt more like a video game to me. My family didn’t start with America Online. Instead, we began with “WoW!” and then moved on to Compuserve. “WoW” is where I first learned to have fun with boring things. In chatrooms, typing 36 spaces followed by a “Name:” prompt would make it look exactly like someone else had said what you typed. I ruined countless early internet romances by doing this. But I was only 9 years old.

Welcome!

Moving to America Online introduced me to many things. Private chatrooms on AOL had a limit on the number of participants at any given time. This is why my favorite private chatrooms like “VB” were not just VB, but VB1, VB2, VB3, VB4. IXA, art, and warez—all of which had private chats—were where I learned to program with Visual Basic 3.0 at the time. Dos32.bas was a staple for a script kiddie before I made my own. Creating my own Proggiez forced me to learn Photoshop to make GUIs for myself.

Free Coasters

AOL would send out countless “Free Trial” CDs. They became an early meme online and offline. Even once you subscribed, your mailbox would still be flooded with them.

Keywords

I would sit and try random words as keywords to see what was there, like a treasure hunt. Keywords functioned as a URL bar where you would type a word to access AOL’s personal web. This was populated by companies who created WebOL versions of their websites. I still remember using the keyword to open Need For Speed 1’s advertisement page that offered a free download of the demo. Internet speeds were so slow that it took 6+ hours to download it, which meant you could stay connected without going idle and getting kicked off.

Illegal Crimes? Nah, it’s just fun!

A fun activity for a youngling on America Online was programming your own punter or using someone else’s and wielding the power to kick anyone you wanted off AOL, sending them back to the login screen. That was tame compared to other pastimes. Hacking accounts, labeling whether they were slave or master phish (which we called <><), and trading master phish for stolen credit card numbers. No longer was there fear that you would get your family’s AOL account banned because you were on someone else’s.

Kali Linux? Nahhhh!

SubSeven was one of the earliest Trojan horses. It ran rampant across America Online. Most used it for fun pranks, like trying to make people believe their Hewlett-Packard was possessed by constantly opening and closing the CD-ROM. Some used it for more nefarious purposes, though. Not me, but others.