Whoa - fun to hear and think back. My experience on AOL definitely inspired my interest in programming. I had a really similar experience. First, with BBS's

Whoa - fun to hear and think back. My experience on AOL definitely inspired my interest in programming. I had a really similar experience. First, with BBS's on my Packard Bell Pentium 60mhz (got from Costco, had that famous floating point bug). That's when I learned the difference between a local call and a local "toll" call (same area code as you doesn't mean local...oops) Then I got on AOL (starting with 2.0 for DOS I think), Prodigy, CompuServe, and eventually MSN. On AOL I ran into those "proggies" and met a guy named Cybermun who explained to me how to write them (he wrote AoHades). He gave me a copy of VB 3.0. I found it totally accessible in that I could design my UI point-and-click and then figure out how to make it work. I'd ask Cybermun questions endlessly and he'd never answer directly, always forcing me to figure it out. My dad bought me a copy of the white book (The C Programming Language, Kerningham and Ritchie) Hung out in private room "warez2" most of the time. I was "WalrusPowr" (and a dozen variants of that name). Every time I entered a chat room I'd announce myself with some funny string and "{s walrus" (remember that!? It would play a .wav file, provided you had a file with that name). After some time I wrote a relatively popular shareware app called AoLOL! (worked on AOL 2.5 thru 4). Each week folks would mail me a check for $14.95 for registration. AoLOL! added a row of icons to the AOL toolbar and gave you a bunch of extra functionality (most notably a "keep in touch" feature, which would cycle through a list of friends and automatically check if they were online). This was before the Buddy List and before ICQ had launched. Incidentally, I was put in touch with the founding ICQ team, let them use my AOL account to play with the recently launched AOL buddy list, fixed the broken English on their web site, etc. (they were four young Israelis). They offered me a job but I was in high school, had no drivers license, etc. My UIN is 104006 (they started at 100,000). I also wrote an app called "AoLMNOP" which was a bit of a joke. It launched of "Ao" proggies and generally mocked the entire scene. I can't tell you how many hours I spent staring into a 14" CRT between 10PM at 4AM chatting and "coding" (VB3 and mostly "Sendkeys". Some Windows API calls. Ha!) while my parents thought I was asleep. My younger brother tells me he'd wake up to the sound of me laughing out loud and hammering away at my keyboard. It was a big part of my youth. Ahh, fun times.