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:waves bye Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris:1 and Hackers' Lounge:2 were the first major time sinks of my digital life in the late 90s and early 2000s. ychat and ymsg w

by emidln 14y ago

:waves bye Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris:1 and Hackers' Lounge:2 were the first major time sinks of my digital life in the late 90s and early 2000s. ychat and ymsg were my intro to network protocols. I learned Makefiles, C, C++, and Python so I could build, understand, and modify programs like curfloo, curphoo, zinc, and gchat+/gyach. Although I moved on to IRC, I'll never forget when someone passed me "Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit" (and the implicit link to Phrack) or the first time a bot I created logged in and took drink orders. The pride the first time I wrote a patch for my client to handle a login change all by myself. A lifetime later, I know I wouldn't be where I am as a programmer if not for the encouragement of friends (some of whom I still talk with and do business with) I made as a teenager on yahoo chat. A lot of people I know grew up on IRC, but Yahoo Chat was my first love. Good bye, I'll miss you!

dopamean 14y ago
> or the first time a bot I created logged in and took drink orders. My first experience with programming was writing bots in the mIRC scripting language. After first getting things to work the feeling was truly empowering. I have to say though, my next attempt in programming was in C and I found it extraordinarily difficult to get started in. Having said that, I was 14 at the time. I think the fact that my first programming experience was with a scripting language really affected how I how I think about programming now. Ever since then I've found it easier to learn scripting languages than systems languages. Maybe that doesn't make sense to some but that's just me.
fmela 14y ago
I had a really similar experience. As a bored teenager in the late 90s, I would sometimes log into the Yahoo chat rooms using the computers at my high school. The chat client was a Java applet, and it was atrociously slow and prone to crashing. I had started teaching myself to program a few years earlier, so creating a chat client seemed like a fun project. There was a guy that hung out in the Programming:1 chat room with the chat handle was 127001 (he was able to create that handle before Yahoo became more strict with the chat handles one could create) that had reverse-engineered the protocol and posted a guide online. I wonder what happened to him. Thanks, loopy! Anyway, I created a Yahoo chat client in Win32/C as I was learning the API and the language. I was the only user for quite a while, but eventually I posted it using the free web space EarthLink gave me for being a dial-up subscriber. It got pretty popular through word of mouth. Later, when I installed Linux for the first time, I took that code and turned it into an ncurses-based client. It was a lot of fun, and somehow I ended up turning the fun I had hacking on little projects like that into a living.

by emidln 14y ago

dopamean 14y ago

> or the first time a bot I created logged in and took drink orders. My first experience with programming was writing bots in the mIRC scripting language. After first getting things to work the feeling was truly empowering. I have to say though, my next attempt in programming was in C and I found it extraordinarily difficult to get started in. Having said that, I was 14 at the time. I think the fact that my first programming experience was with a scripting language really affected how I how I think about programming now. Ever since then I've found it easier to learn scripting languages than systems languages. Maybe that doesn't make sense to some but that's just me.

fmela 14y ago

I had a really similar experience. As a bored teenager in the late 90s, I would sometimes log into the Yahoo chat rooms using the computers at my high school. The chat client was a Java applet, and it was atrociously slow and prone to crashing. I had started teaching myself to program a few years earlier, so creating a chat client seemed like a fun project. There was a guy that hung out in the Programming:1 chat room with the chat handle was 127001 (he was able to create that handle before Yahoo became more strict with the chat handles one could create) that had reverse-engineered the protocol and posted a guide online. I wonder what happened to him. Thanks, loopy! Anyway, I created a Yahoo chat client in Win32/C as I was learning the API and the language. I was the only user for quite a while, but eventually I posted it using the free web space EarthLink gave me for being a dial-up subscriber. It got pretty popular through word of mouth. Later, when I installed Linux for the first time, I took that code and turned it into an ncurses-based client. It was a lot of fun, and somehow I ended up turning the fun I had hacking on little projects like that into a living.