Ah, FidoNET. Two things about Mastodon are what got me thinking about BBSs. 1) Administrators running their own instance that they can customize and have local

Ah, FidoNET. Two things about Mastodon are what got me thinking about BBSs. 1) Administrators running their own instance that they can customize and have local conversations on, and 2) FidoNET, where instances relay messages to each other across a network. I had worked on a similar network at the time which used Frontdoor in front of the BBS to call other boards and relay the messages (and receive calls from boards), but was never a part of the FidoNET network myself. Haha - also "I was too scared of my parents" .. me too. There was not as much darkness as the skull images suggest, but trying to look 3l33t was /<-rad and all. RemoteAccess ("RA") was a nice software, I used that myself for a short time. I remember that I had a strict limit of $13 a month that I was allowed to spend on long distance phone calls. I paid the bill myself, but my mother could not understand wasting more than $13 (I think it was originally $10, and I negotiated up to $13) a month on calling BBSs. I kept a hand-written log of how many minutes I spent in each area code and the price to call that area code so that I would not go over.