Remember when?

[Almighty Colin]

Remember when lots of people used local ISPs for dialup and hosting?

This is a funny one. I spammed one million AOL email addresses back in 1996 before I found adult. Wrote a program that queried the AOL lookup which was public at the time and gave user names in response to simple queries. It woul just keep pumping out first and last names from a huge list and recording all the user names and then attaching @aol.com to teh end.

My spam-program sucked and I crashed the local ISP. A few minutes after it crashed the phone rang and I knew it was the ISP. I shit a brick and had someone give them a messsage that I was out of town. ;-) Later I explained what happened and they were a lot more understanding than I thought they would be. After that, they wouldn't let me run programs on the server without them first looking at them. They had no problem with the spam though.