Before Gore gave us the Internet…

I can spend as much time poking around strange Wikipedia articles as I can on Youtube. Last night I was reading the article on Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) from back in the day. These were all the rage with the nerd-folk and myself back then. (Notice how I differentiate between myself and the nerd-folk there…) After Prodigy started requiring a credit card to get their free month of service with a $5 software disk, I was forced to stop buying $5 disks and making up fake names to use for service. That was a bummer. Fortunately my Dad turned me onto the BBS systems. Not quite as fun looking as Prodigy, but nevertheless, I dug right in and helped SysOp a couple boards. Apparently BBSes are still up and running – who’d have thought!

The whole wiki BBS article is interesting, but the links at the bottom of the page are worth a look for nostalgic purposes. Here is a site that lists historical BBSes by area code. I found all the ones I frequented. Now if only someone kept a historical drive with all mine and my brother’s old ASCII and ANSI art.