Story time.

Back in the late 90s when Y! Chat was possibly at it’s peak, there was a community of kids that were cracking old accounts. A few years prior Y! had started enforcing [a-zA-Z0-9_-] only account names. Young chat nerds were after these older accounts that had wild alt-chars in their names, in order to parade them around chat, as well as for bragging rights.

I certainly did not provide the scene a series of dict-based programs, that were specifically designed for this purpose.

At this point in time I was still stuck on 56k dial-up because DSL hadn’t made it to my area yet. Though these programs were capable of sending rapid requests, my personal connection would only really allow me trickle through a dictionary.

During testing before release, to avoid tedium I would set the app to run before I went to bed. I had coded in the ability to select an MP3 file, that would play when a match was found, which I leveraged to wake myself up so I could inspect debug logs for any unexpected entries.

(I should take the moment to establish that I definitely only tested using accounts that belonged to myself.)

The MP3 that I chose to wake me up was the first track from the Hexen II OST, titled “Blackmarsh”.

Every time I hear this track, I am filled with really deep nostalgia, associated with a period during my teenage years, when I got to be a mildly infamous internet cowboy.