This was my preteens/teens. What a rush that was! Seeing all of those groups/logos and I was on half those sites, and the transition from BBS's to the dawn of t

This was my preteens/teens. What a rush that was! Seeing all of those groups/logos and I was on half those sites, and the transition from BBS's to the dawn of the internet, or at least when it started to be used by the public. My fav BBS was Fear and Loathing (in Las Vegas). It had a ton of LD lines to connect to, which was important since it could take many hours to DL a single game as they grew in size/spanning multiple disks, so the lines were full a lot. I learned a lot of area codes lol, as you could usually tell which BBS's were good ones based on the city they were in on the BBS lists. So many hours spent tweaking connection string parameters on the good ol US Robotics to make it dial faster, pause less in between tones, etc., so you could try to connect to a board faster. It was almost like you were hacking the BBS just to connect to it (redialing over and over lol). There wasn't even caller ID back then, so they couldn't prevent you from hammering them. It was like a lottery system whether you connected or not, as hundreds of others were doing the exact same thing at the same time 24/7. Oh, and you had to dedicate a lot of your phone line time to hacking LD codes so you could spend the rest of the time phreaking so you could actually connect/download without paying LD charges. It took a dedicated phone line. It was always fun when someone else in the house picked up the phone and ruined your download. Thank goodness when the z-modem protocol came out with resume functionality. Way better than y-modem or whatever it was before it. lol ;)