[171243]

Wow, this is a blast from the past. I got started "programming" by writing batch files to do all sorts of interesting and crazy things. Stuff like sleeping for a second by printing a predefined number of spaces because the sleep construct didn't exist. There was some guys homepage (think 1996/7) that I remember had an incredible amount of scripts to do things like grabbing the logged in users name, etc all through batch files. In the process of researching possible commands to use in the scripts I came upon "debug" which seemed to be its own language but was far too advanced for me as a 9/10 year old. Glad to see someone finally found a use for it! Good times.

[contingencies]

I once wrote a batch file virus... it was mostly a proof of concept because the only programming documentation I had access to was an MSDOS 5 manual. It was a great manual!

[171243]

I showed off the "net send" flood in my school which was a batch file that looked like this:

    :label
    net send username
    goto label

Someone then substituted * for username and flooded the network. I got to spend a week in in school suspension for that!!!