I am glad that I got involved in the scene, I learned quite a bit programming wise at a young age that really helped me later on in life. The only people I ever talk to really are Fallen, who runs a pretty successful web design company (I remember he recently did Meg Whitman’s campaign website) and Oogle who has turned into a crazy linux programmer mostly working on Asterisk.

As for myself, I actually work for a Recording Studio/Record Label

I remember a bunch of you. I spend a good amount of time on IRC and playing CS with a bunch of you. My time was from 1999-2001, which is so freaking long ago but does seem like yesterday. Also did the ao-programming thing, but that consisted mostly of just copying dos’s code (but only after I took the time to understand it!).

I was 13 when I started ao-programming. I now work as a web developer and am getting my master’s in Computer Science at NYU. I do have to say that being exposed to good-quality code at a young age has helped me be an organized programmer today. Kind of like Jedi training — you gotta start young or you’ll turn into fucking Vader. Anyway, crazy how most of us are still involved in software.

Cheers!

The second, and more important misconception is that we were in any type of competition for anything. First, I wasn’t doing what bofen was doing. I didn’t desire attention. I didn’t release programs. I never claimed to be the best and I never wanted any kind of king-of-the-hill status. Bofen was doing what every other “progger” did. I was just picking away at the win32api and the AOL client, trying to see what I could do.

The win32api came easy for me. I had c++ experience on my side. Back then, all MSDN example code was in c++ and most vb guys couldn’t read it. I could read the headers and convert the calls to vb. I had my own little dumb programs I released to friends, but they were mostly intended as learning projects. I looked at others modules, but really couldn’t take much from them because using 16bit code on a 32bit os, coding in a 32bit dev environment, and building add-ons for a 32bit program didn’t make much sense to me. I was able to come up with some cool stuff and I shared absolutely every piece of code I wrote with my friends, incomplete or not.

So along comes KnK wanting me to release a module. I said no. He then talked me into writing a help file. In the process of writing the help file, I put all of my code into a module and tested it to make sure what I was “teaching” actually worked. Once the help file was done, I was talked into including the module with the help file to serve as example code. Almost immediately people started criticizing me for releasing an incomplete module. It didn’t have everything people expected. Of course it was never intended to. I let some time go by; hoping people were learning and then completed the module, releasing a second version some time later. This again was meant to help, not to create any type of attention. There was also a third version with some pretty wicked stuff in it, but it was never released.

I released a few other things as well, all intended to help somebody in one way or another. There was the chatscan for programmers. There was the module scanner for KnK to help him sort out the growing number of module submissions to his site. There were others, but not one was for the average AOL user. Everything I did was for programmers.

I did get attention. I did get a reputation and even some kind of status in some peoples’ minds. It wasn’t something I sought out and it never went to my head. There were people who liked me and there were people who didn’t. The people who liked me were like freaka here (thanks for the nice words man). They appreciated what I did. They got it. The people who hated me all said the same thing. I didn’t answer emails or instant messages. I ignored their questions in chat rooms. I searched for dos32.bas yesterday and found a few websites with it still on it and one guy said what I’m saying here. And its all true. I didn’t help everybody. I ignored some emails. I blocked instant messages. I even ignored the chat. This is all true. You won’t find anybody who says I called them names, that I bragged about myself, or talked down to them though. That just didn’t happen.

So yes I’m guilty of ignoring some people. Some of the people who I hung out with can tell you about the funny screenshots of my AOL screen littered with 20+ instant messages. They can tell you how I gave them the password to my hotmail account so they could help me answer the 70+ emails I got every day. They can tell you about the people who would scroll their question in our chat room over and over again then eventually say “f u dos” and leave. They can tell you how I was reluctant to just give out answers and how I insisted people at least try. And a few can also tell you how truly stressed and torn I was when I left AOL due to the harassment.

So when bofen came along with his insults I really didn’t understand. I had never talked to him before. I hadn’t even talked about him. I didn’t know who he was. I’d dealt with pests before, but this guy’s persistence is what drove the situation. I think he should’ve just hung out with us. The resources we had in our room would’ve built him up. We had monk-e-god writing some cool code, KnK and Hider with the biggest sites out there, Syber who was arguably the loudest guy in the scene, and several other cool guys who understood the code they were writing and were just as willing as I to help others. Allied with us who knows what could’ve happened. Maybe people would be still talking about how awesome bofen was back in the day. Maybe he’d be making six figures writing some sick ai algorithms now instead of humming to a tuning fork. Who knows?

And freaka, if you get to see that video again, that guy taps from getting hit in the face before I put the armlock on. Watch closely and you’ll see it.

- dos