I started coding when I was 7, inheriting a Dick Smith VZ200 with a broken tape drive, so any code written on the terrible chiclet keyboard would be lost if the power was turned off.

I loved low-level code, doing a lot of x86 assembly coding on a 386DX-40. When Windows 95 came along, I stayed at the low level and loved finding ways to do novel things on the new platform.

I worked on many random projects back then, including graphical demo work and some fun reverse engineering work.

This reverse engineering work led me to one day wonder if I could modify the content of websites as they were being downloaded.

I extracted all the exported functions from the winsock DLL, made my own version with stubs of these functions, modified the data receiving function to look for a test string (a bit of DoubleClick HTML) then placed it into the directory of my browser and fired it up.

I still remember the feeling when I saw it work. A new kind of usefulness that makes your mind consider everything else it could be used for. But for now I just worked on adding a few different filter types (link targets, content sources, etc), along with an extremely basic installer and interface.

My ads were filtered.

First tests

Out of pure curiosity, I wondered if anyone else would find it useful.

I nervously pitched the idea to my dad, securing $100 to cover hosting costs for the launch.

I copy/pasted mIRC's disclaimer text (sorry Khaled), then asked a designer friend I knew at school to do the graphic design on the site (thank you so much Vanessa), signed up for Regsoft payment processing and did my best to post to every shareware site in existence.

Our first installer was 29kb in size, which included the filter list.