[grifter]

Some IM punters exploited issues with the primitive HTML renderering capabilities in AOL, when receiving certain HTML AOL would either take too many cycles render it, detracting from its network code cycles causing a disconnect from he server (booted), or in some cases crash. Some IMing also exploited bandwidth disparity, whereby they would send more than you could consume forcing a disconnect.

[el_duderino]

The 1IM punt HTML tag that overloaded AOL’s own buffer <font size="199999999999…"> and fill the 9's to the end of the IM window.

I believe there was even a more effective one that was something like <font size="¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿...">.

[gech]

That was it? So simple