When I was 17, internet access was just starting to be practical and affordable for my family when America Online started offering their unlimited $20/month dial-up access plan. However, soon it became apparent that AOL was not capable of handing the increased customer usage and as a result, many customers were getting busy signals when they tried to login and access their accounts.
One of the ways AOL ought to remedy this was by instituting a set of popup windows that would ask a customer to confirm that they were actively using the service. There was an activity monitor within the AOL Desktop software that would attempt to prompt the customer after a certain amount of “inactivity” and another that would popup at a set interval (usually every 45 minutes). If the customer did not answer these prompts in a timely fashion, they’d be logged off.
The problem was that oftentimes these timed popups would log the customer off when they were waiting for a long file download to complete, dropping their connection and forcing them to log back on to AOL and restart the download from the beginning. In the age of slow modem speeds, restarting these downloads proved to be a hassle.
To try and alleviate some of the burden of monitoring AOL’s timed popup prompts, numerous shareware programs were created to simply answer these popups on behalf of the customer. But these initial programs usually were costly (for the simple function the program actually performs), trial versions were crippled with “nag” screens, and the download and install process for the programs bordered on overkill.
As an AOL customer, I was tired of AOL’s popup prompts but did not think the shareware applications available were worth it. Instead, I created a small freeware program that would unobtrusively live in the customer’s Windows system tray and answer the popups automatically. This program was written entirely in C, without any external libraries or programming toolkits, and utilized the Win32 API functionality available to detect the presence of the popup prompts. I’ve released this program to the AOL community and created all documentation/websites surrounding it. I had also worked to answer questions regarding the program and worked to create incremental updates.
KillTimer was downloaded over 100,000 times, was featured on the Kim Komando radio show as a “shareware pick of the week” and was acclaimed by many software directories as a valuable program.Unfortunatly, some time after realeasing KillTimer, it came to my attention that the program was being sold on eBay to unsuspecting AOL customers as a shareware program, and these unscrupulous sellers were also responsible for sending a sizable amount of spam to AOL accounts.
KillTimer was written out of principle that the type of functionality should be free to AOL customers and to find out that both myself and the people who bought from the unscrupulous sellers were getting ripped off forced me to take some kind of action. I decided that it might be best to charge a nominal fee for KillTimer releases myself, and enable a registration process that would prevent others from selling the program outright.
I sought to create a new version of KillTimer with the shareware features, however did this begrudgingly and ultimately stopped supporting the program altogether. It was a great experience being able to provide value to such a large base of people and I am thankful for the great users I had a chance to chat with and appreciated their support.