Logging in, seeing who else logged in, to a small community that controls its own destiny.
Lately I’ve been nostalgic, I guess, about how tech was in the 90s. It was less glamorous, less usable, but also way more human and civil. Everyone was just into technology and sharing cool stuff.
This little corner of the web kind of feels like that sometimes.
You’d connect your computer literally to the phone line, such that if you picked up the phone, you’d just hear computer noises. That was called “dialup.”
But instead of dialing up to an internet service provider (ISP), you’d call a BBS, where someone else had a computer hooked up to a phone line, waiting for strangers to connect. Some BBS’s were professionally run and had many banks of modems and computers in parallel. Most BBS’s were run by volunteer amateurs who put a computer in a basement and hooked it up to a second phone line.
If the phone line was busy, someone else was on the BBS or it was out of phone lines. Your time was limited to avoid you hogging the line and there were sometimes quotas for uploads and downloads (you had to upload files to download files).
It was all 100% text-based. You could message other users (or users on other networked BBS’s), play some text-based games, share files, and post to forums. It was like the Internet, but local.
Great description! Ran a single-line Wildcat! BBS back in the day. Respectful, interesting people, never had to use the ban hammer.