I was an annoying little shit back in the day so of course I thought Punters were the coolest thing around I would terrorize people in AOL chat rooms by kicking them offline with IM spam, or sending obnoxious ASCII art into the chat

these programs did influence me in a positive way though

I learned to code by downloading some early version of Visual Basic retrieved from an MMer in chat on my painfully slow 2400 baud modem
I then ended up creating my own rudimentary proggies
Like one that would target a chat room user and immediately mirror any comment they made, bewildering the unsuspecting person and offering myself much entertainment

So thank you to AOL Punters/Proggies for setting me on my current career path, even though it began as a pre-pubescent online terrorist (I called myself MoNeYmAsTa, lol)

There was a Mac client (AOL4Free, I think?) that worked by sending a token saying that the user was in a support session after each request. Support was free, so this eliminated billing charges beyond the monthly subscription. I read that it was the work of a college student. Made my life sweet at the time.

Another memory of that time: PC users calling themselves “barcodes,” with names like IIIllIllI flooding our chats and running macros to harass Mac users. Stupid shit. Whatever. We had knock-off macros, but I don’t think we had an equivalent to AOHell.

Also: Cheers to all who built a career on this hobby / fascination when we were kids and such. What a great outcome. “Say HERE to get added to my mass-mail of pirated material!”