3 ms·
If anyone is interested, I have an archive of a lot of AOL progs[0]. These got me into programming and I made a couple of my own that are now completely lost t
by RexM 4y ago
If anyone is interested, I have an archive of a lot of AOL progs[0].
These got me into programming and I made a couple of my own that are now completely lost to time.
ccoms (chat commands) were my favorite. The program would scan the chat and when you sent a command, it'd do whatever you asked and send a response back to the chat for everyone to see. Basically turning the AOL chat into a public command line. One of the more popular things people used it for was for playing pirated music. You'd send `play rammstein` to the chat, and it'd start playing a random Rammstein song from your mp3 collection.
I started writing one later[1], although I haven't touched it since 2016. It'd connect to your spotify account, instead.
Also, it seems Mark Zuckerberg was in the scene. He apparently wrote Darth Phader (a fader.) A fader would make your text in chats fade colors by injecting html to change the text color between each character. So, your text would start blue and fade to red further along in the message, then maybe go back to blue, it was all configurable in most of them.
Edit: I can't believe I left this out, but there's also a facebook group[2], Justin has a site with a lot of content about progs[3], and I recently stumbled on the AOL Underground Podcast[4].
[0]: https://progs.rexflex.net/ https://progs.rexflex.net/
[1]: https://github.com/RexMorgan/qwik-tools https://github.com/RexMorgan/qwik-tools
[2]: https://www.facebook.com/groups/297526060414740/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/297526060414740/
[3]: https://justinakapaste.com/ https://justinakapaste.com/
[4]: https://aolunderground.com/ https://aolunderground.com/
- freeplay 4y agoThis is amazing. Just the other day, I was thinking about how the AOL progs scene set my career in motion before I even knew what software engineer was. Your archive just gave me my nostalgia fix for the next month. Thanks.
- notadev 4y agoI hated ccoms. Just flooded chat. Eventually chats would just be everyone shuffling through their list of 10K songs downloaded from Napster.
- RexM 4y agoYeah, 15 year old me was pretty blown away, though. It was also a way to discover music from other people's curated collections. It exposed me to a lot of music I wouldn't have heard, otherwise.
- Duhck 4y agoThis is amazing because I see 4 of my own proggies up here. I need to get a VM setup to run these! Thanks for putting this together
- todd3834 4y agoUnbelievable! It looks like the prog I made in 6th grade is on there. Gotta download into a VM to make sure it’s mine and not someone using the same name. I’ll update this thread when I know.
- 4e530344963049 4y agoHa, seems I am on Justin's site: https://justinakapaste.com/search/tsa https://justinakapaste.com/search/tsa
- treesknees 4y agoWow, very cool. I see at least 3 programs I wrote or helped with in the AIM section. I'll have to dig out my source code to see if any others are present. Definitely going to spin up a VM and see them run again. Thanks for this.
- RexM 4y agoNo problem, have fun. You're going to run into issues with ocx files. You can search around for them online, but it's a real hassle downloading them to older versions of Windows because SSL support has moved on from what Windows 95/98/ME/2000 can handle. I've found I can either hit the download without https from the Windows box, or copy them to an S3 bucket and use an http URL to download it out of the bucket.
- andrew_ 4y agoI cannot believe you have subzero on there. I'm sure there are others of the same name, but I wrote one of them. I was a huge Mortal Kombat / SubZero fan (right - down - right - high punch). I may have the source code buried on some floppies in storage.