When we were obnoxious teens we would call two numbers (like the local McDonalds and Burger King) and then conference them together while we stayed on mute and listened in.
Wrote a bot that generated a name and joined a big public channel.
Stuff like jenny21 tina123 etc.
Then it spammed some generic greetings and waited.
"Hello, anyone wanna private chat?"
When someone started to talk to it it would start another private chat with another person choosen randomly and copy the messages of the first person to the second and vice versa.
Then it copied the whole conversation in a different channel.
That's what's sucks about data: it's pretty ephemeral. I have some code I wrote when I was little but only the good stuff. I wish I had the crap code and the code I wrote when I was learning so I could see what 12 and 13 year old me was really like.
Yesterday I found dvd-r with backup of my 'startup' project sources (entire repository). It was around '07-08, I was 20+. Should give it a try, hope I can survive after that many facepalms.
Sidenote to newcomers: burn them dvds periodically! (oh, no, ultrabooks...)
I remember how much work I put into my Geocities site. Many many months. I look at it on the wayback machine now, I can bang that entire site out in about 2 hours now.
Yes but for comparison you would need to code something in Go that's really complicated now. At the time being a Geocities user put you in an extremely rare cohort, which is of course why they originally sold for a billion bucks. Those of us who used it were extremely valuable users from a long term point of view. The first people on the internet who made their own websites AND linked all of the relevant stories everywhere else on the internet.
When I was a kid we used to phone people whose phone numbers were mathematically interesting. This was in the North-East of England (Sunderland), and we were often amazed at the responses. You'd ring some lady out of the blue and tell her that her phone number was a power of three, or something, and she'd say, "well is that right! I never knew. How interesting."
We always thought we'd just get told to bugger off. Rarely was that the case.
By some odd coincidence, I've since moved to the other side of the world but I sit and type this message in the old living room in Sunderland where many of those calls were made.
Kind of tempted to do it again...