L33ching warez!
Upgrading from a 2400 baud modem to 14.4 was amazing
Tying up the phone line for hours on end just to download the latest Apogee release. That and the magical connection sound. The places I dialed in to had so few lines you were as likely to get a busy signal as a connection.
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ANSI art. I had a great ANSI art piece depicting Father Mulcahey in MAS*H, which Iâve never found on the Internet. There were numerous poems â one of which, about a rosary, had a line about âa prize, a price, a sacrificeâ, which was my first exposure to Goth subculture, and Iâve never found another copy of it. Kermit. Zmodem. Internet gateways, bits and pieces of âWhite Rosesâ that I had to sneakernet to my brotherâs Pentium to play.
The community. Sassy, Max, The_Satin_Knight. Half-a-dozen giggling teenaged girls filling up the forums on my board with ever-more-silly ways of exclaiming âKEWL BEANZ!!!â
Learning about Phil Zimmerman on a usenet echo.
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Hello,
In the 1980s, I was a young and awkward teenager in a similar small circle of friends growing up in deepest, darkest Silicon Valley. BBSes were a way for me to interact with the world around me, or at least the parts within the 408 area code, doing everything from downloading software to learning how to talk, interact and socialize with adults.
BBSes got me my first girlfriend, as well as my first job in the computer industry, where I ultimately ended up running that companyâs BBS (amongst many other hats I wore there).
I guess I shall always think of BBSesânot to mention CompuServe and the then-nascent Internet with USENET and IRCâas not just a kind of surrogate home, but a place where I grew into being an adult.
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Listening, in the wee hours, to my 300 baud modem wheeze and whine as it connected and then staring in wonderment as the connection unveiled the green phosphor letters of some far away secret den of information. That and bad ascii porn.
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I keep reading the first line wrong:
As a temp .gifâŚ
I met two of my closest friends BBSing!
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Well, unless you lived in a very tech-heavy area of the US (think NYC, SF, perhaps silicon valley cities) there werenât many BBSes you could get to without incurring a long-distance phone call. Which led to things like this:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/08/i-was-a-teenage-hacker.html
(phreaker, really, with a dash of hacking, but I wasnât sure everyone would get the distinction.)
So it was kind of the same problem, unless you had a way to deal with long distance charges, or were extremely lucky in where you lived, your BBS options were fairly limited.
I know in the UK every call was metered, even the local ones, but it wasnât this glorious infinite paradise in the USA either.
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My uni in the middle of corn fields in âfly over countryâ was a node on ARPANET. I interpreted the computer lab charges we incurred each semester to mean that I could use whatever the hell was on those lab computers. So I did.
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