<story><title>History of AOL Warez</title><url>http://peteflow.blogspot.com/2007/04/history-of-aol-warez.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Eclyps</author><text>This brings back so many memories... this is where I really started my &amp;quot;programming&amp;quot; with Visual Basic 4, hunting the web for .bas files that I could load into my own VB project to create 1337 rainbow text in my IMs, punting users, trying to work around the rate limiting that they added to chatrooms... it&amp;#x27;s incredible that the AOL warez scene is essential the catalyst for my now successful career in technology 20+ years later.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vogt</author><text>Yep, same. My mother&amp;#x27;s best friend worked for MS at the time and brought me home VB4 in a giant box. Little did they know what I was up to (nothing too south of innocuous, I was mostly trying to spam render middle fingers in ASCII in AOL chatrooms)</text></comment>
<story><title>History of AOL Warez</title><url>http://peteflow.blogspot.com/2007/04/history-of-aol-warez.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Eclyps</author><text>This brings back so many memories... this is where I really started my &amp;quot;programming&amp;quot; with Visual Basic 4, hunting the web for .bas files that I could load into my own VB project to create 1337 rainbow text in my IMs, punting users, trying to work around the rate limiting that they added to chatrooms... it&amp;#x27;s incredible that the AOL warez scene is essential the catalyst for my now successful career in technology 20+ years later.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>allcentury</author><text>Same!  I used to spend hours picking the right theme song to bundle on the opening splash page to ship with my software that never worked.&lt;p&gt;I left tech in college and only got back into in my late 20&amp;#x27;s, happy to be back but with a bit more maturity.</text></comment>