before teh internets - Remembering the BBS Scene

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Started at 14.4k baud, I realize this is a quasi-retarded statement because I don't know how awesome it will be to live in the future, but I don't think I could of personally came to being in a more interesting time than now... We're all at the very beginning of this information revolution. Woo!

Or, the "Information Superhighway" as they used call it..

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I'm 25.. While I was never on BBS's I started out on a 75mhz 14.4k comp.. My first ventures past being a casual user was creating doom2 levels.. Then got into the AOL scene coding "progz" with VB3, punters, scrollers, etc.. ahhh.. AOL_Frame25, all the bas files.. memory lane.
 
Ahh the good old days - first modem of my own was a 9600 baud on my 486sx33, had a few BBS's I dialed into, remember cramming shredded paper into that tiny but loud as hell speaker on the modem so I could get connected without that god-aweful racket notifying my parents/siblings that I was dialing in.

Good times - thanks for the trip down memory lane :)
 
I had a handme down 300 baud for a while. But I had to hide my use since my parents were sure I would be arrested for hacking.

No shit.

I am not sure how they knew my patterns so well.

Then I moved to a 1200, then 5400 all on Commodore 64.
 
Whoa, back in the day fo shore...

The Bay Area was a geek hotbed, just like it is today, and all the coolest geeks were BBSing. I remember:

Golden Gate BBS
Fog City
Pandemonium (hacking/phreaking)
Stonehenge
Digital Towers (they fucking invented online gaming!)
Noble House
Pirates Bay (warez, duh)
Aardwolf (okay until the xtians took it over)
Magrathea

Shit, I remember coding stupidity in BASIC and being thrilled by me smokin' new 4800 baud modem ahahahaha!

10 HOME
20 SWEET
30 GOTO 10
 
LORD FTW
&
Code: 
THE VOID BBS.....
                       ___                _____
             ___/\____|  .|__/\____  ____|    /___  ___ _____/\
      .------\_   _/  |_ ||   ____/--\   |   / __ \|  .|\____  \_- ---.
      |      _/   |   _/ ¦|   _/  \_  \  :  /  |:  \  ¦|/   |   /     |
      |  ····\____|___|___|________/···\___/\______/___|_______/(K)·  |
      |                                                               |
      |   (9) 28.8 MODEMS     +1-414-276-0785     FAAAAAAAAST!        |
      |  (12) GIGS OF FILEZ   +1-414-276-0860     COOOOOOOOOL!        |
      |                       +1-414-276-0722     HOOOOOOOOOT!        |
      |     AMIGA/CONSOLE     +1-414-276-0461                         |
      |         PC            +1-414-276-0782                         |
      |                       +1-414-276-0785                         |
      |   OPEN TO PUBLIC      +1-414-276-0790                         |
      |     FOR 1 WEEK        +1-414-276-0860                         |
      |                       +1-414-276-0868                         |
      |                                                               |
      `---------------------------------------------------------------'
THE VOID BBS....
-( added on: 15-May-95 11:25:31 BB-LhaChecker v0.5 by BiLBo BaGGins/M! )-
 
My first modem was 300 baud hooked up to a (I think Wyse) terminal which was mostly useful for accessing the local university. Next was a 1200 baud Hayes I mostly used for CompuServ and the occasional Binkley board, then at some point wwiv showed up and I ran a few wwiv and telegard boards that were part of wwivnet and wwivlink at various times. wwiv 4 inspired me to learn c, learning c made cs my education and career path.
 
I remember connecting to AOL at 28,000bps, was pretty slow and AOLs crappy interface didnt help either. They seems to think providing all this useless crappy content in a "walled garden" justifyied their exisitance. Probably worked in the start when people where still afarid to hit up the real internet.

Best thing about AOL in the early days though was phishing the users. I used to sending pishing messages from AIM to peoples AOL acc saying there was security error and we needed their password. Working surpisingly well. I used to go in a read peoples email, i thought i was the shit!
 
I worked my way up from 300 bps to today. I still remember sitting in my apartment connecting to a local BBS trying to get Castle Wolfenstien to download. It was just over 1 MB but the BBS had an hard 1 hour logout rule. The problem was it took just under the 1 hour to download the game. Failed 4 or 5 days in a row to get Castle Wolfenstien because I could not get through the interface to the download page fast enough.

This was 1991 I think?
 
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