You had to find the number. Hearing about it, reading in a magazine. People would buy shareware magazines and sometimes there would be numbers in there. Then di

You had to find the number. Hearing about it, reading in a magazine. People would buy shareware magazines and sometimes there would be numbers in there. Then dial up and tie up your phone line. The modem made these weird loud tones. Breee-uup-wee-wee like when you accidentally call a fax machine. If someone called when you were using it they’d get a busy signal. I forget but I think call waiting would mess up your connection (instead of a busy signal the caller would blip the existing call so you knew to check the second call) It was fragmented. Remember long distance phone calls were a separate additional charge. Hours long bbs sessions over long distance were a mistake you’d probably only make once. except for phone phreaks with a captain crunch whistle. (There was a cereal box giveaway that accidental emitted the operator admin tone of 2600hz . Once emitted you could use touch tones to override standard billing routines. People doing that from home went to prison. I never did it but I subscribed to the hacker magazine of the same name for a while it was small format like 8.5/11 folded in half and stapled) You’d go on for a few hours in the evening, often late into the night. Connection speed were slow as balls. 14.4kbps it could take all evening to download an image or a game. I remember prince of Persia which was a game with animation ahead of its time had copy protection built in. “Go to the fourth page of the manual and read the second sentence. Drink the potion equal to the number of letters in the third word” all the other potions killed you. I didn’t buy the game and never made it past that screen. I was coming online at the end of that era. I used an internet enabled version called hotline. I’d dial up my local internet exchange provided by the university in town, make sure my tcpip extension was loaded and connect out from there. Once on it was a sort of Message board. Not everyone present at the same time, dms with people on at the same time as you. Pirated software. Hotline had a tracker service for server discovery. Conversions were weird geeky posturing stuff. Childish irritating fuck-heads were the norm. (At least in my circles)