I used BBSs from around age 13 to around age 18, and ran my own for about 4 years. It's hard to disentangle my feelings about those platforms from just the feel

I used BBSs from around age 13 to around age 18, and ran my own for about 4 years. It's hard to disentangle my feelings about those platforms from just the feeling of being that age: that's where I hung out with my friends, where I met my first girlfriend, and it was the context in which I learned both programming and design. One thing I'll say is that talking about how slow the connections were, and how little disk space there was to work with, and how only one person could use the system at a time is missing the point: those things sound constraining now, but at the time they made complete sense. They were the state of the art. There were certainly times I wished my xmodem transfer would go faster, but I think the same thing today when I'm buffering a YouTube video. The state of the art always feels great at the time, and old-fashioned just a few years later. Anyway, the experience of using BBS' at the time was a lot like checking Hackernews for new content. You'd log in, look at the forums, see if anyone had posted anything new, and then log off. You could play door games, but a lot of them could only be played once a day. Another thing about the experience was that you were always aware that you were on the sysop's computer, and he may have been watching everything you did. They could be looking at your screen, watching you type a message in a forum. Sometimes, you'd try to log in late at night, or early in the morning, when you knew the guy was asleep. Nowadays, that sounds crazy to me: I'd never use a website where I knew someone was watching everything I did. Not tracking aggregate metrics, but literally watching every keystroke as it happened, and seeing everything I saw at the same time. From my perspective, one of the biggest technological advances was ZModem, a transfer protocol that let you restart failed transfers. Prior to that, transferring something large (say, the game DOOM) took hours, and if anything happened that disrupted the transfer, you had to restart. That happened all the time: someone picked up the phone, or there was just a bad analog signal. In the case of DOOM, I think it actually took me 2 weeks to successfully download the shareware version. Another big one was FIDOnet, which was a gateway between BBS forums and Usenet: it let you read usenet forums, and post on them too. I distinctly remember one day there were a bunch of new message boards on a BBS I frequented, with a whole set of new members that all had @ symbols in their usernames. It was so weird. That was the first time I'd ever seen an email address. That morning sort of marked the beginning of when the BBS world switched over to the internet world, for me.