I have described this world to a few people in my life recently, and look back on it very fondly.
Everyone was anonymous, everyone was crazy motivated, and it was a wild west of credit card theft, software theft, and more.
I wrote a few prolific mass mailers and servers, was pretty well known in the scene, and was only 12/13 years old.
I learned to program, create great user experiences, and more.
My servers were the first to have plain text search: /server send photoshop instead of /server send 26-40
It also hosted the lists via a PHP webapp, tracked metrics on the web across users of the app, and connected to IRC.
It was a wonderful time of chaos, rapid learnings, and intrinsic motivation that shaped my life forever. If not for this period of time in my life, I dont know where Id find myself.
Everyone was anonymous, everyone was crazy motivated, and it was a wild west of credit card theft, software theft, and more.
I wrote a few prolific mass mailers and servers, was pretty well known in the scene, and was only 12/13 years old.
I learned to program, create great user experiences, and more.
My servers were the first to have plain text search: /server send photoshop instead of /server send 26-40
It also hosted the lists via a PHP webapp, tracked metrics on the web across users of the app, and connected to IRC.
It was a wonderful time of chaos, rapid learnings, and intrinsic motivation that shaped my life forever. If not for this period of time in my life, I dont know where Id find myself.