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3 months ago
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Alex Pasternack
Fri, Jul 18, 2025, 5:13 AM 27 min read
If you were a teenager on America Online in the mid-’90s, there’s a good chance you got it. Unlike a lot of the files flying around the early warez scene, this one wasn’t a piece of pirated software like Photoshop 3.0 or a beta of Windows 95. It was a small Windows add-on program for AOL, and it wasn’t made by a software company, but by a hacker calling themselves “Da Chronic.” When you launched it, the title screen depicted the giant disembodied head of AOL CEO Steve Case floating in a sea of flames, set to a funky excerpt of Dr. Dre’s “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang.” The title, rendered in 3D, spelled out just how far outside of the known, pixelated world you had come: “AOHell.”
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In 1995, AOL was how most people in America were getting online, most of them for the very first time. Dialing in over landlines on 14.4 or 28.8 kbps connections, what you heard when you logged on was “Welcome!” and “You’ve got mail!”—as if the internet was your new home away from home. And yet, while it began offering access to the nascent World Wide Web that year, AOL itself wasn’t really the internet; it was more like a walled, manicured garden, with a set of cheery web-page-like brand-filled spaces known as “keywords” and a growing warren of official and unofficial chatrooms. Its blinkered vision of the internet made it, as some have noted, the Facebook of its time.
This story is part of 1995 Week, where we’ll revisit some of the most interesting, unexpected, and confounding developments in tech 30 years ago.
AOHell, initally released in November 1994, was the first of what would become thousands of programs designed by young hackers to turn the system upside down. Built with a pirated copy of Microsoft Visual Basic and distributed throughout the teen chatrooms, the program combined a pile of tricks and pranks into a slick little control panel that sat above AOL’s windows and gave even newbies an arsenal of teenage superpowers. There was a punter to kick people out of chatrooms, scrollers to flood chats with ASCII art, a chat impersonator, an email and instant message bomber, a mass mailer for sharing warez (and later mp3s), and even an “Artificial Intelligence Bot.” Crucially, AOHell could also help users gain “free” access to AOL. The program came with a program for generating fake credit card numbers (which could fool AOL’s sign up process), and, by January 1995, a feature for stealing other users’ passwords or credit cards. With messages masquerading as alerts from AOL customer service reps, the tool could convince unsuspecting users to hand over their secrets. Da Chronic and his collaborators, The Rizzer and The Squirrel, called this technique “fishing,” or, using the hacker spelling, “phishing.”
