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)

I have a similar story, except for me it was Yahoo! Chat. Got a hold of VB, and started making chat bots, brute dictionary “tools”, etc. I managed to produce a few that were fairly popular in the scene.