1) I logged onto LOIS BBS daily Central Coast of California. I was on a Commodore 64. I forgot what program I used, it came with the 300 baud modem cartridge

1) I logged onto LOIS BBS daily Central Coast of California. I was on a Commodore 64. I forgot what program I used, it came with the 300 baud modem cartridge and loaded from a 5.25" floppy disk. 2) I discovered LOIS from an IRL friend BlackDragon, RIP. The sister site in northern California was TREX. 3) LOIS was used by many people in the county. The operator / owner Pete a.k.a. Communicator had phone lines in multiple NPA/NSX that forwarded to a bank of lines in his room. He had multi split-66 blocks in his room with LED indicators that the line was ringing or in use. He did a good job of keeping the wiring neat or neater than I imagined it would be. IIRC there was something like 30 phone lines into the system. RIP Pete and many others from that time. After some time the site was connected to the internet via telnetd but I don't know it's current state other than the domain and its associated DNS NS domain appear to still exist but telnetd is down and the A records are gone. At least half of my IRL friends from that site have since passed away. Prior to that I was in a CB radio club called the Greybeards and needless to say most of them passed away long long ago. 4) The vibe varied day to day. People talked about whatever was on their minds. Long running D&D games were popular. Social and sexual topics were popular. Relationship issues were popular. But really it was whatever people were dealing with at the time. Hanging out at places that served coffee all day were popular. 5) There was not much discussion of programming. It was a social platform and we had gatherings at pizza places all the time. Pizza places with beer was a mandatory requirement. For some idea of the overall vibe just watch all 4 seasons of Stranger Things minus the supernatural bits. It's surprisingly spot on.