Remembering the BBS

Anonymous Coward writes "Nice reminiscence about BBS's, back in the day and all. Author describes them as "Where a teenage loser could lose himself", which for me would have been pretty accurate. I still miss being able to find cool ASCII graphics, text-based RPG's, and the Anarchist's Cookbook all in one place."

Re:Flashbacks

[OMGWTFBBQ]

- Taking 5 hours to download one grainy porn pic.

ASCII pr0n

[RedAlgaron]

yes, ascii pr0n, good old pr0n.

Re:those were the days

[ahoehn]

Oh god, I've been waiting for this article for years. There is little more satisfying than gaining another level in Legend Of The Dragon, or giving your character a venereal disease visiting the prostitutes in Usurper, (heck, when I first played usurper I didn't know the meaning of venereal or usurper.) I remember the sheer glory of becoming friends with a sysop and becoming a co-sysop, being able to change things, snoop around, and all that. But none of that could compare to my discovery of Warez on a BBS. I remember all of the secretive glances shared by those of us at the local BBS picnic who had access to the Warez section of one of the BBS's, and that wonderful feeling of superiority. I think I ended up actually successfully downloading one warez game, Sim Ant, but it wasn't so much what you did do, it was what you could do, and the smugness, never estimate the power of smugness.

Re:WWIV ... still up and running ...

[C_nemo]

"... and it's still up and running over at Eagle's Dare BBS [wwiv.net]"

you just dont say that on /.

[aarsathe@morbo aarsathe]$ telnet bbs.filenet.wwiv.net
Trying 162.33.159.251...
Connected to bbs.filenet.wwiv.net.
Escape character is '^]'.

BUSY
Connection closed by foreign host.

OMG! a /.-ed bbs server :)

You know you're an old fart when...

[Pig Hogger]

You know you're an old fart when it took you a *WEEK* to download Linux at 2400 baud from a BBS.

And the sex you get from the Internet isn't like the sex you had from the BBSes...

Re:Flashbacks

[gmack]

being asked by the kid next door how to delete the porn before his parents see it.

Re:ANSI archive sites?

[BrookHarty]

On WWIV BBs's, you could include an Ansi signiture. I put a fake "SysOp Chat mode Enabled" then pretrended to hang up them and pause. I dont Remember exact WWIV chat, but it was something like. And I put pauses between keystrokes, to fake a real person. :)

[SysOp Chat Mode Enabled]
Hey There, I have to remove your account, Nice knowing ya. :)

+++
NO CARRIER

Ahh the good ole days. God a few nasty emails about that.

Re:One important I forgot!

[LoveShack]

I remember when my mom started freaking out because a forty year old man was calling her 12 year old son because of something off of the "computer"...

Re:ah fare thee well

[zsmooth]

You were supposed to pay for it?? Wow, I didn't have any idea...