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I found that AOL was nowhere near enough, wasn't 'true network' (I understood this at 10), was heavily criticized by the PC media because of this (which I also
by bl4k 16y ago
I found that AOL was nowhere near enough, wasn't 'true network' (I understood this at 10), was heavily criticized by the PC media because of this (which I also used to read) so I switched it off and discovered BBS's
The BBS's were the foundation of almost every person I have met in tech, every job, all dev, every startup I have been involved with and there is a very strong camaraderie amongst the early BBS hackers (most of us went on to become v early web hackers).
So I see from how inside AOL you think your theory might hold, but outside of it there was an entire larger network that was far more interesting
- _delirium 16y agoI used both in the mid-90s, sort of on the tail end of the BBS scene, and while I did generally like the BBS scene better culturally, I think I agree with the previous comment that AOL got me more into programming. The fact that people were trying to do so many things on AOL that it wasn't really intended to support led to a whole cottage industry of teenagers writing scripts and bots and whatnot, whereas my usage at least of BBSs was much more straightforward and "normal" (I used them in the intended manner). I don't think I ever really scripted anything in my terminal emulator, though perhaps others did. I ended up really getting into programming a bit later via mIRC scripting, though.
- badwetter 16y agoYeah BBSes were a lot of fun back in the day. Used to play around on alt.hackintosh on Usenet too. Fun times!