The Github ReadME Project has released a really nice story on the AOL hacking community. I’d heard they were working on an article a few months ago when a fellow dev from back in those days emailed me to say he’d discussed the idea with one of the editors. After that I talked with the article’s author, Klint, but I wasn’t sure if the story was going to come out. The era is 2+ decades old at this point, and it wasn’t clear to me if outsiders would really get what it was all about or if Klint would be able to round up enough information to make a coherent piece. He did a great job investigating and understanding the topic though, and it was cool to see the that article came to fruition. There was even a neat discussion of it at Hacker News.

As an aside, one amusing bit that was left on the cutting room floor was an antidote regarding Mark Zuckerberg that Ben Stone (author of Jaguar32.bas) had recently relayed to me. Leaving this story out was definitely for the best, as it would have been off topic and probably a distraction, but I figured I’d share it here as it’s a fun little story.

Zuckerberg’s AOL Origins

Before creating Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg cut his teeth in the AOL scene by creating the Vadar Fader. It’s a silly little app, though nothing to be ashamed of – I created one too (and it’s still actively used after all these years – a story for another time though). However, an interesting wrinkle was recently added to the story when Ben emailed me to tell me had been examining the Vadar Fader to see if it held any secrets. And well, he found something interesting. What did he find? After poking and prodding he decided to search for text strings inside of the exe file and discovered that Mark had used a well known bas file to create the Vadar Fader. Which bas file? Jaguar32.bas.

Discovering this apparently left Ben in shock, though I think in the back of his mind he knew it to be true. The reason he thought I might find this story interesting though was because he used my API Spy to help guide him through making Jaguar32.bas (along with help from Monk-e-god). It’s a bit amusing to think about, and there’s a joke about the butterfly effect in there somewhere, but I’m sure Mark would have created Facebook even if he’d taken a slightly different path.  

Would Mark Remember?

Even after 20 years I still remember bas files I used. They were my introduction to open source before I even knew what open source was. I even remember the very first one I used – genozide.bas. I sent so many emails to genozide for help with it that he got mad at me. And while I can laugh my part off as the butterfly effect in action, Ben’s work in the AOL hacking scene directly impacted one of the richest and most successful people on the planet, and that’s actually pretty cool.