[JoshGlazebrook]

I still remember back in 2000 when we still had AOL. I was eight or nine and I had my own aol account. You could have a dozen or so sub accounts on the main one. And because it was a "kids account" there were chat rooms for kids. Being the lovely kid that I was, of course I went into one and was like "how the f*ck are you all?"

Well the kid chat rooms were moderated and our entire AOL account was disabled. My mom had to call to have it re-enabled and of course they told her what I had said.

Fun times...

[bcsmith]

I remember I used to enter the chat rooms by saying "Ever dance with the devil in the pale moon light?" Being a popular quote from the original Batman movie and it went well with my screen name (xsatanx) it usually got a laugh...

... until I stumbled into a religious chat room.

Got my account disabled and had to have my mom call as well.

[codezero]

A fun read on AOL's moderated chatrooms: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_Community_Leader_Program

By 2000 you probably missed the volunteers, but still interesting.

[gcb0]

when my folks got me a modem, the only thing my father made me understand was the phone bill values... i was 7 or younger. learned all about initialization strings and the minimal about terminal emulation to get to the message and mud games part of some bbs. after that it was downhill.

[elektronaut]

I developed a serious internet addiction when I was a teenager. My parents were working class and struggling to make ends meet, and I was always dreading the day the phone bill arrived. After a couple of confiscated modems (I had a secret backup box of old 28.8s), I realized I could just trade my web skills for money and pay the bills myself. I guess that's what I've been doing since.

[nisa]

This sounds pretty similar to my experience. Confiscated modems rang a bell! I've also dreaded the day the phone bill came. A friend and me used all kinds of workarounds: Free AOL CDs, Toll Free Dailup numbers where the banking data was not validated in time... got serious trouble (rightly so) for that. Not much later I got a small job and we had 64k ISDN there, later at that time insanely fast DSL 384k. Learned Linux at age 13, Debian 1.3, Redhat 5, I now make a living of that... The addiction is still there, through.

[gcb0]

webskills only existed some half decade later or more...

one thing i learned fast was that a 1 line dial in bbs had good attendence, so i started to run mine after some time. was interesting, and damn cheap since nothing beats free

[polemic]

Heh, good times making ASCII art for a local BBS here :)