I missed the days of BBSes but I did run a Hotline server at that same age of 12 or 13, for quite some time. I still have SyQuest and MO disks full of the serv

I missed the days of BBSes but I did run a Hotline server at that same age of 12 or 13, for quite some time. I still have SyQuest and MO disks full of the server archives. I also still have the notepads full of IPs for servers and my login/password for them. I was online earlier than that too (1992), but I completely missed (or even ignored) the whole world of BBSes sadly. To my young self, the full-color high-res web seemed far superior to the 80-char dot matrix printouts from my friend whose older brother was finding neat stuff from BBSes. It turned out I could generally find all the same stuff on the web, and then some. What I didn't realize I was missing was the community/networking, especially locally. Hotline was amazing, but due to it being internet-based, there was definitely not any sense of "familiar local crew". That said, I still have friends I regularly talk to that I met from Hotline back in ~1997 onward.