Ask YC: How many people here were regional BBS users back in the day?

I was pretty young at the time, but I got in at the very tail end. There was a BBS for farmers called FBMInet that my parents were on. I don't remember much about it (except that there were lots of pirated games). I still use the same password that I chose there for sites I don't care about.

My first web access was via a BBS run by an organization called Edmonton Freenet. For a (very) small yearly fee you could dial in and use (amongst other things) lynx and pine. Very rustic, but considering that a decade or so before we were on a party line...

Sysop in ATL.

Too young?!?! Hah.

I ran my own, of course. Customized version of Color 64 on my Commodore 64, in Greenville, SC. A couple of my friends ran part-time boards (usually 8PM to 8AM), but I paid for a second phone line so I could run 24/7, and I had a second system for my personal use. A stack of 1571 disk drives, 1200 baud modem, and memory expansion. I lusted after a 10GB hard disk, but never had a hard disk until the Amiga days a few years later. I dabbled with a PC board, as well, running...I think it was Wildcat. But it wasn't as much fun to play with. So it was only up for a few weeks.

By the time I moved from South Carolina to Houston, I was an Amiga user, and so spent a lot of time writing and trading MODs with other Amiga nuts in the area. A year later ('93) I started spending time on the Internet, and never started another BBS--redirected the effort into my first website.

Ran a six line BBS off Renegade in Minneapolis back in 89-92.

Mobile, Alabama had a lively BBS scene in the early to mid nineties. I spent my teenage years on various boards and even ran one for about a year.

User acquisition with BBSes is much harder than websites; it taught me a lot.

BBSes, specifically the "Mobile Area Freenet", were also my introduction to the internet. Gopher was awesome at the time, and I flipped when I saw the first graphical browser and figured out how to establish SLIP connections with WinSock.

Kids these days have it too easy... ;)