This one is for all of you 56kers out there who miss their AOL <3.
Personally I miss the chat rooms, the download channels that go at 300 bytes per second, WELCOME YOU GOT MAIL, and the VB5 private chat. Gotta love home made punting apps, .bas files, KNK4Life, and phadez (a blend of two colors created by HTML tags). Yeah those were the good old days. My word scrambler bot was awesome. And then AOL would keep patching all of our punts and we would just keep finding more bugs. And then everyone traded punters with each other and had 1000+ collections of them. Several though were viruses and I even got my comp wiped out by one. Kind of strange when you run a .EXE and nothing happens but your hard drive starts going crazy. I hit CTRL+ALT+DEL and saw DELTREE and paniced. My files were gone for good, along with my punters. Of course today I realize just how immature the VB5 chat really was. People would scroll swearwords right and left and the whole room was flaming each other the whole time.
You were kind of limited though as far as chats went because AOL firewalled your internet and blocked just about every port, including port 6667. This became dubbed the AOL ban by DALnet regulars, which I managed to sneak on by an IRC proxy my friend hosted on port 80. Of course, now I think AOL shut those rooms down. Bad AOL... but now I have my cable internet so who cares?