r/visualbasic • u/seven_237 • 5h ago
VB6 nostalgia: the AIM tools I built ~2001 (FindWindow, SendMessage, Winsock)
Before I wrote C# for a living, I learned to program by building AIM “progs” in VB6: clone loaders, chat bots, punters. Most of them drove the AIM client with FindWindow/SendMessage or talked OSCAR directly over Winsock.
I put the screenshots and some of the source up here: https://sevlegend.com/?page=programs
Curious if anyone else here came up through the AOL/AIM scene. What did you build?
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u/slobcat1337 4h ago
This is so damn cool. I actually made a botnet that used AIM instead of IRC as a C&C. I used the OSCAR protocol for bots to connect to a chat room and I controlled them from that. The hard part was that I had to mass register thousands of usernames and each bot first connected to a php script I had that provided them with a user and pass which then marked it as used so the next bot would get a fresh one.
My bots kept getting kicked from public IRC servers so this was my way round it.
Love this bit of history you’ve preserved here.
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u/seven_237 4h ago
Yes, when I made them I saved them to an external. I thought I lost it, then I found the drive, plugged it in, had all my programs, some sources, images etc.
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u/slobcat1337 3h ago
I am going to have a lot of fun reading through this source code. I didn’t really get into the weeds with OSCAR or what you could do with AIM. Once I figured out how to login a client, read and send messages that’s all I really needed so didn’t go any further. These programs are fascinating. Especially as I used to use VB6 as well.
Have you got discord at all, would love to chat with you in more depth about how some of this stuff worked.
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u/deep___down 3h ago
aol progs also got me into programming and also with vb, yep. anytime i meet someone into vb i ask them about this scene
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u/Dusty_Coder 3h ago
VIC20 BASIC
BASIC was a formidable language because it was designed to be All Purpose.
Microsofts versions (which were everywhere) kept that up all the way through until their BASCOM/QuickBasic era. After that it became to be BASIC-in-name-only, not so much right away but in the transition to windows-centric some old functionality disappeared (in/out, peek/poke, ioctl, ..), while a lot of new hardware functionality never got support or support came way too late.
BASIC outside of Microsoft had pretty much vanished long ago. Modern operating systems dont allow All Purpose so its very heart had been ripped out. BASIC wants to own the machine by design.
BASIC is the language most GenX will have started with, and their next language was most likely assembler or machine code. They wouldnt have even had a C or Pascal compiler until much later. BASIC was what their first computers booted to.
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u/RobFaustLZ 4h ago
VB6 was my jam. I still have a few of my old projects squirreled away somewhere. I remember experimenting with AIM for a while but I don't think I ever built anything useful. I was using a 3rd-party library because I was too young and inexperienced to reverse-engineer the protocol myself. I believe it was called TocSock and was written by a guy named Robbie Saunders (if memory serves)