BBS use and the internet (Score 1)

I signed up for a World account in the first days of his operation, and still maintain my account there. It remains my main email account of last resort, even though I have two email domains now. The interviewer and Barry perhaps didn't know about the dialup BBSing that went on before there was a commodity internet available. As a note, I dialed up to his system in Boston for about 2 or 3 bucks an hour, so it wasn't cheap, but it didn't break the bank either. (From Irvine, Ca.). Later a company here in Irvine, network intensive started to offer a dialin locally and the cost went to a flat 10 or 20 bucks a month to get a PPP dialin connection, which could be left up on a phone line, sort of like todays connection. In fact it was about 1/3 the speed of DSL if anyone cares. Back to the main topic, the BBS craze was hot from the late 70s to 89 and was as big as anything around. You would get large grouped networks of BBSs and you could dial into a local one, and they would all sync with each other in various ways. I see the Tomcat package now, and recall one package that was huge back then. There were also Mustang BBS's. Many small fortunes were made into nothing with the craze as some companies (I think Mustang was one of them) went to revenue, and you would pay thousands to get a system to run on a big bank of PC hardware and inbound modems. This all went into the tank overnight when World and then several other companies came on the scene. As to what did you do? He didn't mention Gopher and FTP. The main use of dialups later on was to trade software, some legal, some not so much. The Internet was a trove of such stuff and a utility much like Google, called Gopher was out there. It didn't offer anything but indexing and file name searching, but was far better than the BBS scene where there were indexes of various quality available, and you would have to call and register to get things on distant BBSs. The email was interesting, but newcommers like me from the land of BBS didn't have a lot of use for it, though as various people started to use Usenet and that grew you could make friends and use it more. As he mentioned if you were laid off, you had contacts you lost, and that world didn't intersect much with the BBS directly.