Before the surviving record
The archive does not contain the beginning.
When I first connected to the internet through a 28.8k dial-up modem, some of the first websites that captured my attention were about hacking, phreaking, cracking—all the good stuff. Astalavista.com became my homepage. I spent hours every day reading every text file and guide I could find, trying to understand how it all worked.
Much of the information was already old. The vulnerabilities had been patched, the techniques no longer worked, and many of the tools belonged to an earlier version of the internet. None of that mattered. It was still the most interesting thing in the world to me.
I built my first website using Tripod’s website builder. Unfortunately, no surviving copy of it has been found. It was called eliteprodgy.cjb.net, and I filled it with the hacking and cracking tools I found interesting. To my surprise, people started visiting.
Then, one day, I was sitting in a Yahoo chat room when my computer suddenly froze and had to be hard-rebooted. I rejoined the same room and it happened again. That day, I promised myself I would find out how they were doing it—and learn how to do it myself.
Along the way, I met other kids trying to learn the same things. I began teaching myself Visual Basic 5 and later found a cracked copy of Visual Basic 6. We experimented, took things apart, shared what we discovered and taught one another how to build increasingly complicated programs.
What is preserved below is the website and community that grew from that.
Elite Prodigy became a home for my software and the programs made by my friends. We shared source code, tools, tutorials, discoveries and everything else we learned. It started small, but eventually attracted thousands of visitors every day.
I was only sixteen when it began.
The entire site was built by hand in Notepad using raw HTML. Friends gave me hosting because no conventional hosting company wanted hundreds of so-called “hacking” programs sitting on its servers. The bandwidth usage was enormous for the time, particularly for a site offering so many downloads.
Whenever I had to move to another host, I uploaded the entire collection again over FTP using that same 28.8k modem.
It could take days.
But the site stayed online, because a community of people believed it was worth keeping alive.