What BBSes did you log into?
 

This thread http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/general...rst-modem.html made me look up some of the old haunts I would crawl back before there were such things as AOL. Once a week the Recycler Newspaper would come out and in the computer section there was a listing of all the BBSes advertising in the area. You'd log on, wait for the sysop to give you permission to have access which could be a few hours or sometimes a day or two.

The TEXTFILES.COM BBS List

I found a number of BBSes on the list that I used to haunt, The Keep in Northridge, CA, Dreamscape/Club Playhouse, BaudTown, Talk Channel. I was on lots of warez, private single line boards, and then they came out with multiplexing modems!!!! 16, 32, and 64 line bbses!!!!

One BBS, the Keep, I became friends with the Sysop and even got to see the TI-99/4a running it. It was amazing to see the thing that I was connecting for years. Not only that, but Greg the sysop was a PC tech, he taught me an awful lot about being a consultant. How to charge for things, how to fix things, and be confident about what I was doing. I owe a lot to that man in getting me started.

As I found these things, I called a friend who I introduced to BBSing, and she found photos from a meet up and we reminisced about the past. She even found photos of who became her first husband at one of the meetups! All back in the day before the internet, and now found because of the internet!

Can you find the old BBSes you connected to? What were they? What did you do on them?

I used to frequent a number of local BBSes in the city I grew up in east of Toronto. The one I was on the most was called the Iron Ring. It was desirable because it had MajorMUD in addition to multiple lines, which allowed several of us to play at the same time. In another thread recently, I described MajorMUD as a combination of Zork and World of Warcraft.

I also played it on my cousin's BBS for awhile, but it got too expensive for him to have multiple phone lines.

Damn that game was addictive. I used to stay up in the wee hours playing it. It was so much like WoW that way.

That's a blast from the past.

Let's see...

705-277-9133 The Crypt
705-328-0232 Imperial Ballroom
705-328-1170 White Tiger
705-328-2954 Starlab
705-878-5684 Hello World

That might've been all of them. It's hard to remember for sure now. I do recall that I sunk countless hours into Legend of the Red Dragon and other games; I wasn't really interested in downloads or anything like that. It was all about the games for me.

The Bureau of Air Management of the US Environmental Protection Agency used to run a BBS, I don't recall the name of it. I was on it a lot in the 1991-1994 timeframe. It was the only way to get the new regulations and documents as soon as they came out.

I only did BBS for a little while, AOL was what got me really started into computers.

This is the one I play LORD on for awhile.

828-322-1681 HICKORY, NC G-2, NW NC NET, The Mind's Eye

If I recall correctly, I got started with CompuServe back in the early 1980's. There were a couple local BBS's I checked into every few days or so but I'll have to look at my old notes to remember more about them. They weren't just porn, they offered plenty of other good info including some technical/science stuff at/from government and university sources. The first image organizer I tried was CompuShow and I went through a few versions of that before the "built in" stuff prevailed. Right from the get-go I hated AOL and still do, so I immediately bailed out of the early free subscription I had, although I wouldn't be surprised if they still had me as an active account, now over 20 years later.

While back then I frequently played Pong on the early consoles found in a lot of bars...and I was local champ...the first PC game I ever got into was DOOM, like in the early 1990's.

Now adays the "newsgroup" environment sort of reminds me of the old BBS's.

I looked through all the 513 area code lists (I think) and didn't see one I recognized. There were a few that sounded vaguely familiar, but the sysop names listed didn't ring any bells.

Anyway, the main one for me was the H.O.L.E. (which stood for Home On-Line Exchange.) It had a cave theme... the forums were called "caverns," and when your hour was up, there was some line about your torch burning out before it kicked you off. Only three people could be on at once, and I can remember phone calls beforehand to attempt to get on at the same time. Mostly, I posted on the forums and "The Wall," which was sort of like a shoutbox. There was also a game called Hack 'n' Slash, an adventure game of text-y awesomeness.

There were a couple others, but for the life of me, I can't remember what they were called. It seems like one was only a handful of people, and they were all deliciously geeky. So many posts about Monty Python, Star Wars, and the Jolly Roger Cookbook (also, I was the only girl.) That one had a point system, where you got a certain amount of points for replying to a thread, starting a thread, etc. I think you could buy more time with the points, but the only thing I really remember using was the "name rape" option-- for a certain number of points, you could add your own signature to another person's posts, and it would stay for a week. We had entirely too much fun with that.

Y'know, I miss the sound of the modem dialing & connecting. Those were fun days.

I do too. To me, the whole idea of that sound was a transition from one kind of single person computer experience to a vast unknown to the far reaches like Fidonet.

Today, the computer experience is a seamless transition, and it just isn't quite the same.

kind of evolutionary, ain't it?