A/S/L and the Wild West of Chat Rooms

14/f/CA.

That was a lie, obviously. I was twelve, and I lived in Ohio. But in an AOL chat room in 1997, everyone was 14/f/CA or 18/m/CA or some other fiction designed to sound old enough to be there and cool enough to be interesting. California was the default lie. Nobody pretended to be from Indiana. Nobody was catfishing as someone from Dayton.

The question that started every conversation was three letters long. A/S/L. Age, sex, location. The universal handshake of the early internet. You typed it the second you entered a chat room, or someone typed it at you, and then you made up whatever answer seemed most likely to keep the conversation going. It was the first thing the internet taught us: online, you could be anyone.

Most of us chose to be someone from California.

The AOL CD-ROM Pipeline

Before you could lie about your age in a chat room, you needed to get online. And getting online in the mid-90s meant AOL. And getting AOL meant one of two things: your parents deliberately signed up for the service, or - more likely - one of the four hundred AOL free trial CD-ROMs that arrived in your mailbox every single month finally wore someone down.

They were everywhere. In the mail. In cereal boxes. Taped to the front of magazines. Falling out of Sunday newspapers. You could have built a small house out of AOL trial discs by 1998. 500 FREE HOURS! the packaging screamed, like a desperate carnival barker who would not take no for an answer.

You could have built a small house out of AOL trial discs by 1998. They were the junk mail of the digital frontier.

Your parents installed it. The modem screamed its demon song. The connection crawled to life. And then you heard it. The three most exciting words in the English language, spoken by a robot voice that might as well have been the voice of God:

You've got mail.

It didn't matter that the email was a welcome message from AOL. You had mail. You were online. The world had just cracked open.

Welcome to the Room

AOL chat rooms were organized by topic, theoretically. There were rooms for teens, rooms for sports, rooms for music, rooms for romance. Member-created rooms with names that ranged from innocent ("Friends Hangout 23") to deeply suspicious ("Cool Teens Only No Adults"). The themed rooms were a polite fiction. Nobody in the Backstreet Boys Fan Chat was actually there to discuss the Backstreet Boys. They were there to type A/S/L at strangers and see what happened.

What happened was chaos. Pure, unmoderated, glorious chaos.

Twenty people talking at once. Conversations scrolling so fast you couldn't follow any of them. Someone would ask A/S/L and six people would answer simultaneously while three other people were having a completely different argument about whether NSYNC was better than BSB and someone else was just typing "HIIIIIII" over and over and over.

There were no rules. Or there were rules, technically, but enforcing them was like trying to referee a food fight with a whistle. AOL's Terms of Service existed somewhere, in the same way that traffic laws exist in a demolition derby. People got kicked out of rooms and came back thirty seconds later with a slightly different screen name. The whole thing was lawless and thrilling and a little bit terrifying.

The Stranger Danger Assembly

Every school in America held the assembly. You know the one. The gymnasium. The folding chairs. The police officer or guidance counselor standing in front of a projector showing clip art of a computer with menacing red eyes, warning you that the internet was full of predators and that the stranger in the chat room who said they were 14 was probably a 40-year-old man.

They were not entirely wrong about this.

Your parents watched the Dateline special. They read the newspaper articles. They sat you down at the kitchen table and said something like "You're not going into those chat rooms, right?" and you said "No, of course not" and then you went directly into those chat rooms because you were twelve and the internet was the most exciting thing that had ever existed and no gymnasium assembly was going to stop you.

The stranger danger assemblies were a rite of passage. You sat through the warnings, nodded seriously, and went home and logged directly into a chat room.

And here's the thing. They were right to be worried. The chat rooms were sketchy. The anonymity that made them thrilling also made them dangerous. People lied. People were creepy. People said things to thirteen-year-olds that no one should say to thirteen-year-olds. It was a genuinely unsafe space by any modern standard.

But it was also - and this is the part that's hard to explain - weirdly innocent. Most of the time, you were just talking to other kids who were also lying about their age. You'd have a conversation with someone from Michigan about whether Goldeneye was better than Mario Kart and it felt like the most exotic thing in the world. Michigan. A real person, in Michigan, talking to you. The geography of it was mind-blowing when you were twelve and had never left your time zone.

Beyond AOL

If AOL was the mall food court of chat rooms - loud, crowded, vaguely supervised - then mIRC was the back alley. In a good way. Mostly.

mIRC was internet relay chat, and it required actual effort to set up. You had to download the client. You had to pick a server. You had to know what a channel was. This small technical barrier meant the people on mIRC were generally a little older, a little nerdier, and a lot more opinionated about operating systems.

And then there was ICQ. The flower. The little green flower that meant someone was online. ICQ gave you a number - not a screen name, a number - and you traded it like a phone number. "What's your ICQ?" was the "Can I get your digits?" of 1998. The software made a sound when someone messaged you. "Uh-oh!" Like a cartoon. Like the internet itself was a cartoon, which honestly it kind of was.

Each platform had its own culture, its own etiquette, its own unwritten rules. But they all shared the same fundamental experience: you were talking to strangers, in real time, with no filter and no safety net, and it was the most alive you'd ever felt while sitting in a desk chair.

The Transition

Something shifted around 2000, 2001. AIM took over. And AIM was different. On AIM, your buddy list was full of people from school. People whose real names you knew. People you'd see in the hallway on Monday morning.

The anonymity evaporated. A/S/L became irrelevant because you already knew. The thrill of the unknown stranger was replaced by the anxiety of the known crush. Chat rooms didn't die overnight, but they faded. The wild west got settled. The frontier became a suburb.

It's tempting to romanticize the chat rooms. To pretend they were all innocent fun. They weren't. They were messy and weird and sometimes genuinely dangerous. The stranger danger assemblies existed for a reason.

But they were also the first place a lot of us learned to talk to people who weren't like us. The first place we realized that the world was bigger than our town, our school, our cul-de-sac. A kid in Florida liked the same bands I did. A girl in Texas had read the same books. Someone in Oregon thought the same things were funny. The internet hadn't been sorted into filter bubbles yet. You just landed in a room full of strangers and figured it out.

That figuring-it-out part mattered. The not-knowing-who-you-were-talking-to part mattered. It was dangerous, sure. But it was also a kind of radical openness that the internet has been trying to engineer out of itself ever since.

16/m/OH, if you must know. That was the truth. I never typed it once.