If you were a teenager on America Online back then, there’s a good chance you got the email. Unlike a lot of the files floating around the early warez scene, the attachment wasn’t a pirated copy of Photoshop 3.0 or a beta of Windows 95. In fact, it was being given away by its creator, a hacker who called himself “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.” In 1995, AOL was how most people in America were getting online, dialing in on 14.4 or 28.8 kbps connections, 33.3 if you were lucky. What you heard after the modem’s hysteric screeches was “Welcome!” and “You’ve got mail!”—as if the internet was your new home. And yet, while it began offering access to the nascent World Wide Web in 1995, AOL itself wasn’t technically 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.  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 was the first of what would become thousands of programs designed by hackers to turn this whole system upside down. Built with a pirated copy of Microsoft Visual Basic on a rented computer, 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, an email and instant message bomber, a mass mailer, and even an “Artificial Intelligence Bot.” AOHell could also provide users “free” access to AOL, through a credit card generator (which fooled AOL’s sign up process), and, by January 1995, a function for stealing other users’ passwords and credit card numbers. 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 friends called it “fishing,” or, in the style of hackers, “phishing.”  The program was a form of protest, Da Chronic would tell reporters who managed to reach him at the time (through an anonymous remailer). AOL regularly cracked down on hacker chatrooms, he said, but did little about the “pedophiles and child abusers” who used its platform to trade GIFs and prey on young users. Outraged by the hypocrisy, he wanted to send a message to the internet’s first corporate overlords. As he wrote in his Read Me file, “I think having 20,000+ idiots using AOHell to knock people offline, steal passwords and credit card information, and to basically annoy the hell out of everyone is a good start.” But there were other reasons, too. Da Chronic—who was actually a 17-year-old in North Carolina named Koceilah Rekouche—had to hack AOL because he wanted to stay online with his friends. He didn’t want to pay the hourly fee, because he couldn’t afford to, and he didn’t want his friends or anyone else to pay either. He wanted everyone in, wanted any teen on AOL to feel the thrill of punking and pranking and using the system exactly how it wasn’t meant to be used. Still, Rekouche wasn’t really thinking about where this was going. He couldn’t anticipate the fame—or the fear and paranoia—that would come with being AOL’s most notorious hacker. (His tools caused abuse and fraud and, AOL claimed, millions of dollars in losses.) He also could’t have imagined that his program would mark the start of automatic phishing, which would become the cornerstone of modern cybercrime. At the same time, Rekouche also didn’t realize what else AOHell would come to represent: a free, freewheeling creative outlet for thousands of lonely, disaffected kids like him, and an inspiration for a generation of programmers and technologists. By the time Rekouche left AOL in late 1995, AOHell had spawned a whole cottage industry of teenagers making their own programs, and fueled subcultures where legions of young programmers and artists got their start hacking and breaking and making things. “AOHell made me want to learn to program,” Steve Stonebraker, a cybersecurity expert and host of the podcast AOL Underground, told Klint Finley in 2022. “It was the starting point for this whole generation.” (Rekouche appeared on the podcast that year.) In 2014, Case himself acknowledged that “the hacking of AOL was a real challenge for us,” but that “some of the hackers have gone on to do more productive things.” That included Mark Zuckerberg, who had confessed to Case that ”he learned how to program by hacking [AOL].” Rekouche’s relationship with his creation remains complicated. It’s easy to be nostalg