As a kid, for me it was a place to find fun shareware/free games (like Hack, Rogue's son and Nethack's daddy) and chat with folks from other places in town. Wh

As a kid, for me it was a place to find fun shareware/free games (like Hack, Rogue's son and Nethack's daddy) and chat with folks from other places in town. When I was 16-ish I built a few small BBSs (online after 10p until 8am) and signed up to message networks like Fidonet. It was very much like a very, very slow forum to chat with people (I'd say Usenet but BBSs and Usenet both lost ground when HTTP started taking over the net). Eventually the internet rolled out around here and BBSs phased out and/or were bought out. My BBS phased out but we had quite a lot of dedicated users that ended up following us when we were hired by ISPs. It was a really fun time...