Comment by philfreo

5 months ago

Cool. Reminds me of using SendKeys() in Visual Basic 6 in the 90s

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.visua...

SendKeys() in VB powered basically all of the AOL chat bots in the 90’s.

It’s how I accidentally learned the Win32 API

  • Me too! With Sendkeys and some Win32 API calls, I wrote an AOL add-on (available through Keyword: addons) called AoLOL!. It was my first software business.

    Q: How do you identify the AOL window? A: Look for an app with titlebar = "America[space][space]Online"

And BeOS/Haiku with the "Hey" command which does literally the same, but far more than key input. You can interact with widgets too. Under Unix, there's xdotool and friends.

I loved SendKeys()!

Used it to write programs that would run in the background & spook my friends by "typing" quotes from movies at random times on their computer.