Post #87779 by Swanky on Fri, Apr 23, 2004 6:57 AM

Oh yeah. We ran a BBS out of our house for a long while. We were the first in town to have a 9600 baud modem. But phone lines? No. Just one. You had your auto-dailer call all of the local BBSes and signal when it got connected. You also had a 30 minute time limit. So downloading the porn was near impossible!

Back then, we had monthly meetings where we traded software at the local city court building, held by a cop! Amiga baby!

What you left out, was the way it became national. Once a night, your BBS would call up another close by BBS and upload the new messages and download the new messages. This process swept across the country and over a while, you could communicate with people all over. But it was slow.

I met amny people then that I am still friends with. It was a cool thing. There are a few sites out there that have the old role calls. I went by Uncle Meat in those days and my job was to make trouble. I was a real ass on the BBS and kept the conversation going.

I recall around 1996, when I was in my last year as a Computer Science major in a networking class, full of seniors. The professor was telling us about the Internet and asked if any of us had been on it. One kid raised his hand and said he'd checked the weather. 1996, one guy in a class of 30-40 senior CS majors had used the Internet! That's a FAST change! Even the prof mainly used it to telnet.

Amazing.

Girl geeks rock!