Memories from AOL (ahhh the good ol days)

[BlitzPuppet]

Was reading a AMA thread over on Reddit from someone who had worked at AOL and it got me to thinking....I have a lot of good memories from back then.

I remember back in the day (around 99 or 2000) I had to call AOL tech support because I had apparently gotten a virus from a friend who had his account compromised. I called in and was talking to a tech/customer support girl (I was 14 or 15 years old at that time. Hurray for puberty + deep voice) and after telling her that when I logged onto AOL it'd freeze on verifying password she told me that I had a virus. I started panicking a bit since it was a shared computer at home and was kind of comparable to scratching your dad's car, but she simply said "Hey, I'm not supposed to do this but...you sound cute. Give me your number and I'll have a friend call you and walk you through what to do". She gave me her Screen name and 10 minutes later a guy named Jeremy from Tucson called and walked me through how to manually remove whatever was causing the issue.

I kept in contact with the both of them over a few years but then lost contact. I wonder what the hell they are up to now a days?

Ahhh AOL...This was one of the reasons why I got into IT so thanks to the both of them wherever they are for getting me where I am today.

Anyone have any funny stories from the AOL days?

Honorable Mentions: Rhydin chat rooms!

 

[fixxor]

Was all about the proggies. Men in black, master of puppets.... One that came out that hooked onto the textbox component of the chat window and sent text through it. Was coded in C++ and had a green interface.

 

[Red Storm]

Discovering the Internet was full of naken women... on a dial-up connection.

The good ole' days of images slowly loading from top to bottom. Virtual striptease lol.

 

[EMPshockwave82]

This

 

[Ns1]

Was all about the proggies. Men in black, master of puppets.... One that came out that hooked onto the textbox component of the chat window and sent text through it. Was coded in C++ and had a green interface.

aohell baby

there's actually a wiki!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOHell

AOHell was the first program of its kind, but it spawned a very large number of copycats, some of which rivaled AOHell itself in quality. Fate X and HaVoK were two of its most popular successors

ooh man, HaVoK.

 

[M0oG0oGaiPan]

free floppy disks

 

[WT]

Discovering the Internet was full of naked women... on a dial-up connection.

The good ole' days of images slowly loading from top to bottom. Virtual striptease lol.

That's what ASCII art porn was for. Then you could print it out on the dot matrix and hang it on the wall.

 

[Printer Bandit]

seeing AOL for the first time in '94 was freaking amazing.


taking 3 hrs to download 1 mp3 file was

 

[BlitzPuppet]

seeing AOL for the first time in '94 was freaking amazing.


taking 3 hrs to download 1 mp3 file was

That's what Go!Zilla was for! I remember having to leave the pc on for two consecutive nights (we only had one phone line) so I could download the beta for Counter-Strike. 2KB/s was awesome.

I still wonder we were able to play TFC / CS without any real lag.

 

[crownjules]

I still wonder we were able to play TFC / CS without any real lag.

It was there but everyone had it since very few were on broadband. I think I played CS with 250-300 ping and I would dominate most servers I played on.

Good ole Fate and Havok. I remember playing some message board Star Wars games on AOL.

 

[Printer Bandit]

NetZero offers DSL in my area for $9.95 / month. this is 768 Kbps.

 

[pyonir]

How about trying to cancel AOL service? Man, that took FOREVER to just get them to cancel the damn thing.

 

[lxskllr]

Funny story? Yea, I got one. The guy I work with *still* uses AOL, and their craptastic browser. I'm not sure he realizes the web looks better when you aren't looking through a portal of shit cluttering the browser.

 

[Ns1]

How about trying to cancel AOL service? Man, that took FOREVER to just get them to cancel the damn thing.

i just sent someone 50000 emails. AOL automatically cancelled my account.

 

[runzwithsizorz]

free floppy disks

When they switched to CD's I used to get 1 in the mail every week for a long time. I hung them on my fruit trees to deter the birds. worked much better than pie tins.

 

[lozina]

I remember using some of those programs to punt people offline. That was funny knowing they then had to sit for 5 minutes again to reconnect.

 

[rpanic]

I remember meeting people from bbs' s everyone was teens and early twenties. Dialing into Tyco, Boot hill, in OC Ca.

 

[dmcowen674]

Anyone have any funny stories from the AOL days?

Not funny but maybe more nostalgia.

Remember all that noise when the modems were handshaking to make the connection?

I was one of the Modem Engineers that made the initialization strings that made all that noise for most modems out there at the time.

 

[jumpncrash]

Not funny but maybe more nostalgia.

Remember all that noise when the modems were handshaking to make the connection?

I was one of the Modem Engineers that made the initialization strings that made all that noise for most modems out there at the time.

now THAT's fucking cool, you can honestly say you've made a piece of history

 

[AViking]

Before CD-R I kept all the AOL CD's that they sent in the mail. Between the CD's and floppies I had hundreds.

I was very disapointed when you couldn't just rewrite a regular CD. I had to throw them all away. Well minus the half dozen or so I used as coasters in college.

AOL was total garbage from day one. In the begining you could put in fake billing information and it would take them quite a while before they shut you down. So AOL was effectively free. Then when you had to actually pay for it the service was so damn awful that you would call up and complain and get 6 months or more of free service. So it was almost free. Then it just got absurd and everyone ditched them in the late 90's. Total garbage service.

Most fun was being a teenager though and trolling all their stupid chat rooms. I can't imagine that I was a very convincing middle ages lesbian but I sure had fun trying.

 

[AViking]

I remember using free netzero with the anti-banner crack.

BBS boards before AOL were better than AOL but they didn't last long in my area after the internet showed up.

I used to just drive down to my local college and use their computer lab instead to download MP3's. You could use their T-1 line with Napster and a stack of zip disks to get the whole internet back then.

 

[Remobz]

I never had AOL or used it once. Did I miss some significant part of my life now?

 

[Triumph]

aohell baby

there's actually a wiki!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOHell



ooh man, HaVoK.

Aw yeah, I remember being 14 and trolling AOL chat rooms with that program. You could easily boot people that you were fighting with, and spam the screen with ASCII middle fingers and naked ladies and what not. Good times! I think it also had something where you could enter a "free" section of AOL such as a help area, that didn't count against your hours, but while doing this you could browse the other areas and not using any time. 10 free hours a month had to be used very judiciously! And at 14.4 speeds, you learned to be efficient!