BBS Days

So does anyone still admit to ever having used BBSs way back when before the days of public internets?

I had nearly forgotten about the days of dialling in to 3 or 5 different boards and downloading the message boards to read offline, then quickly jumping over to play 3 or 4 instances of Legend of the Red Dragon.

The best part was the people who ran the things would toil away on fancy ANSI art menu layouts which we would inevitably curse for being too slow to load on a 2400 baud modem. My first taste of text-based arguments about spurious topics like Telix vs. Terminate, DOS vs. Windows 3.1 or Colonel Gray vs. Charlottetown Rural / Skater kids vs. preppies (one which I of course had no interest in and mostly hoped the two groups would wipe each other out.)

bbsmates.com is a pretty cool site to keep track of people you may have met back in those pre-internet days of 2400 baud message board wars and LoRD / TradeWars addiction.

The boards I remember that are listed on there are Glastonbury Tor, Infinity BBS and The Cracked Link BBS. You can also search by area code or city or search for people by their old handles.

I still think the sound of a 2400 baud modem handshaking was way more aesthetically pleasing than the subsequent "high-speed" modems.