Being a kid and not knowing it cost so much to dial long distance, my first 600 dollar phone bill, my parents wanted to kill me. Had to limit my hours late at n

Being a kid and not knowing it cost so much to dial long distance, my first 600 dollar phone bill, my parents wanted to kill me. Had to limit my hours late at night so people wouldn't pick up the phone and ruin my connection. 300 baud fun times, upgraded to 1200 as fast as I could. I remember when multi chunk compressed files and zmodem came out (it had resume), it was an amazing step forward. Ran one of the first bbs's in my area that had a 2400 baud on my commodore 128D, and 80 column Terminal, WOOT!. (One of my bbs friends started Steel Belted Radius on his amiga, and he wrote a bbs, so I learned a bit from him.) Town paper started a multiline bbs that had chat, met other people in my area. I had my first internet email via fidonet on WWIV bbs'es. Started migrating from BBS to tcp/ip via slirp on a education isp, that taught me unix, tcp networking, sockets, etc. Got an Amiga and learned quite a bit about systems and amiga unix. Then I started working at BBS's that started converting bbs's to isps with dial up modem banks with livingston portmaster. Learned much at that boot strap startup. Then I migrated into telecom for my corporate career as a sysadmin/engineer/it work. Good times. One funny thing I did was create an Ansi sequence, that looked like the Sysop (BBS operator) entered chat, yelled at you and banned you. It was a nice prank. Good ole +++, lol. Lots of people inserted Ansi graphics and tricks in posts, for amusement.