Most of the popular boards in my area code only had one line, two if you were lucky. This of course meant only one user could be online at a time. As the eveni

Most of the popular boards in my area code only had one line, two if you were lucky. This of course meant only one user could be online at a time. As the evening falls, and more and more people would turn their modems on, you were met with nothing but busy signals. You'd redial over and over, waiting, and then you'd hear the modem connecting! You were now online, and if the BBS had a time limit, the clock was ticking. You'd go through messages, play a couple rounds of door games, maybe download a new file. After your time was up, you'd connect to some other BBS that wasn't quite as popular. But the door games weren't as fun, they didn't have as many downloads, and maybe the messageboards were dead. It's weird now, since everyone can use Twitter (or the rest of the internet) at the same time. There's no limit to the amount of people who can download Angry Birds from the app store. When the PlayStation Network or HN is down, I guess it's kind of a reminder of those times.