OK so. i've been wanting to post about this for ages and tell just referenced aol so i figured what better time than the present.

Do you remember the old IM punters? back in the early aol days - well before this nub AIM fluff came along, these things would send a ton of IMs at once and would log the victim of the punk attack offline.

some punters included TOS prompts and you could 'TOS' someone by the AOL terms of service report, which was very primitive in the early days.


well i was early on AOL and i was very early on chatrooms and somehow i got to hanging in the original punter room where all the guys making the things got talking. i was far and away the youngest there but i listened carefully and eventually made a few punters that were available on the aol freeware user upload section . my tag was PnUtZ ... lol wtf?? i was like 10 years old?
and a good chunk of people dl'ed it and used it.


then i guess i was somewhat respected in that room (and keep in mind this is still the old days where the scroll punters were all that was going)
and this original boss who more or less invented it all (coincidentally from Boston, and i think he liked me because of this connection we shared) was tagged 'Celt' or 'Celtz'.

well one day the dude starts telling me about the newest thing he's been working on.
revolutionary stuff.
(again this is like aol 2.5 at best, and i think it was earlier)
BEHOLD

the

ONE


IM

PUNTER.


so this fluff changed the game. and this guy was telling me about it. and he gave me the 3rd DL on the beta of Celtix or something like that and it was legit the first 1 IM punter.

i remember feeling so badass when i used that. people would sign back on and just be like wtffff.

i quickly coded my own and i was the 3rd or 4th "1 IM" punter on the market. i named that one TWA or something stupid after a downed twa flight. guess i was still working on the moral compass pre teenage years :/



so ya. just wanted to share that with you all.

punters were crazy. and i was lucky to have been involved to such an extent. i wonder if there is any information on the history like i've mentioned. i ought to check.


feel free to share your experiences and memories. anyone encounter one of mine or celts punters back in the day?

lots of memories :)

those im punters were a fluff.. and back in those days there wasnt cable internet available like it is today.. getting punted off.. sometimes ment u had to re-dial up via phone line internet... which didnt always go as planned

I was a moderator on one of the first java applet online gaming (chess, checkers, cardgames, mancala, etc.) sites back in 96-97. I was playing from a university lab so I had a great connection, but most people were still dial up.

I remember the nerd-rage that would ensue if I booted somebody from a chatroom or a game, lol. 5-6 minutes later they would log back in and start flaming the mods (they never new which one of us did it) and earn themselves an hour time out.

I miss the old internet sometimes, how exciting it was to step up from the Compuserve bbs to the Mosaic browser.

I think there will be money to be made off of 'world wide web nostalgia' someday.

I remember the Yahoo chat booters back in the day. If you were able to get in Hackers' Lounge 1 before it reached its user limit, you were more or less guaranteed to get booted off chat if you spoke on the mic or in the chat by one of the kiddies. If you stuck around long enough, you could learn some interesting stuff. Then, people started writing Yahoo chat clients that were more or less immune to booters, so the booters would get more creative. I remember being booted off once, then it never happened again.

I still remember the time this kiddie was acting all tough because he had a booter. I mean, he literally said "I have a BOOTER!!!" on the mic while possibly imagining standing on a lightning-ravaged mountaintop, wailing on a guitar or something. Everyone else laughed at him, because this was during the time more or less everyone had an immune client. Then he got booted by someone else like 5 seconds later.

^^ lol
the good old days :p

bolty - so true. it wasn't as simple as just signing back in in those days. sometimes if you were off, you were off for the night heh

archaic - couldn't agree with you more on the market for www nostalgia. let's go into business


good to hear these stories :)

While I was at my first co-op job and fortunate to have multiple computers at my disposal (on essentially a gov't related domain) I also spent a fair amount of time hanging out in IRC chat (I think #chat2)... This was 1995.

Anyway, some "script kiddie" (not literal as he was an adult) had downloaded a script to cause a netsplit and take over the chatroom giving himself mod rights upon re-join, kicking everyone in the room and then locking and pw-protecting the channel.

I had recently been serving on a tiger team (ad hoc group of friends that would hack servers for fun and then leave messages for the admins on how to secure their servers).

So I looked at the channels this guy was in on IRC. He was in some hacker related channel... which I joined. He was bragging about having "taken over" in #chat2 (SERIOUSLY?!?!?!)... I scanned his info and quickly determined his server. Using a pretty basic technique I connected to his server (he was using his company's machine... I think he was an IT Director or something)... the idiot used the same username on IRC as he did on his work machine... and guess what... he also used that same username as his password!!! (IT DIRECTOR????)

So, now having an account on his machine, I grabbed the pw file and ran it through a dictionary tool. I quickly had root access.

I changed the root pw and his user account pw.

Then I connected to IRC from his machine and joined the hacker channel... I started calling him out for being a total n00b (I wasn't much more than one myself, honestly, but I was clearly ahead of this guy)... he was flaming back at me and then I said "fine, go ahead and check my address"...

Of course everyone in the room checked and they all started laughing at the guy... he literally said in the room "how are you logged in from my machine?" then "WTF"... I mentioned that he was going to have a hard time explaining this to his boss since his root pw was changed... then the computer disconnected (presumably turned off)...

We didn't hear from him again in #chat2...

LOL! great story atryn

My first retirement from Earth came when I was in the 5th grade because I got 3 AOL TOS violations and AOL suspended the account. One was for calling someone a 'loser' in a kids only chat room, one for forwarding a chain letter, and one for cussing at someone on IM. My parents wouldn't restart the account because they were mad.

Yes, I was involved in creating punt codes, punters, and punt wars. I was in a punter "clan" and we would raid a rivaling chat room and punt everyone off.

It's been like 10-15 years and my memory still recalls the basics:

The 1 IM punt was a basic font code that the Instant Message HTML handler couldn't handle.

font=99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999

would give a WAOL error and crash the entire connection. This was devastating for dial-up.


Then instead of fixing the issue, AOL added a new feature in AOL 4.0 which made it so when sending an IM, it opens the IM on your screen as well, which WAOLed both users.

This was easily dodged by sending $imsOff or something like that when sending the message. They eventually fixed the 1 IM punt but lag punts were equally annoying. I remember creating a few lag punt codes.

I'm happy to find people out there who were like me. Those were fun times. :)

Welcome!

You've got mail!

Goodbye!

Ahh, the sounds of fifth grade (1995-1996)

...IIRC we just made fun of AOL people.