Subject: Old School Internet Stories
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I was wondering if you guys had any stories with doing BBS in the 80s and 90s before the world wide web was public.
BBS stories aren't really internet stories, as your subject suggests. ;)
My family didn't have internet
until '96 and we used WebTV for most of our surfing before using a
computer
so BBS were out of the question .
I didn't even know what a BBS was until after high school. I'm wondering what it was like and if you guys did anything like warez or trading other such files back and forth over baud modems. I'm fascinated by this stuff.
I grew up around computers (my dad always had at least 1). I eventually got
my own computer, along with a modem, as a gift in 1992 (I was 12 years old), and that's when I got into BBSing. I stayed up late many nights that summer calling local BBSes and exploring what they had to offer. I mostly enjoyed finding new games & other software to download, multi-node chat on BBSes that had more than 1 node, and occasionally liked reading & posting messages.
I started my own BBS in 1994 using a second phone line that we had, and I really enjoyed running it. I ran that until 2000, when BBS use had declined severely, and I thought nobody would really want to use a BBS again.
I started using the internet in late 1995. I thought the internet was pretty awesome when I started using it - Lots of information and files were
available very easily. As opposed to BBSes, which might not always have the latest version of a particular program, the internet made it much easier to find and download the latest version of something.
I eventually decided to get back into BBSing in 2007, and I started my
current BBS at that time. I discovered the documentary "BBS: The
Documentary" around that time, which is what inspired me to get back into BBSing (now on the internet though, of course).
Nightfox
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