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

Just struck me that maybe the BBS era aligned with a lot of news.YC's hacker beginnings with online computer usage.

I, for one, began initially with a national Commodore community called QLink. I ran up ridiculous bills before hopping into the regional BBS scene, where I met my eventual wife and almost all of my most enduring friends.

What about you? Or are all of you too young for that era?

I was a BBS user, and also ran a multi-line TAG board (you probably wouldn't know TAG unless you were from Michigan) for a while. Was a FIDOnet node, and was active on the CyberCrime (I think that was the name of it) that some guy out of FL (I think) administered, plus a few other 'nets that I've long since forgotten.

During my short college stint in '91 I found one of the main patch panels for our campus and patched an unused line to my dorm room to run a small BBS out of the dorm for a while. The dorms were setup then so that 2 rooms shared 1 phone line (and 1 bathroom as well). My dorm room had the shared line, a dedicated line, and "access" to the phone lines of the room above us, as the inhabitants never seemed to be there on weekends and it was a waste to fight over phone usage when there was a free line just sitting there...

I wrote the code for moondog BBS (Santa Barbara, CA) - using all but about 10 bytes of memory on a Commodore 64 with a floppy drive. I invented a db system that made us look like a big IBM system. It was really great fun (coded it while in HS).

I was on the Index BBS in Atlanta, as well as gobs of smaller ones. I was a L.O.R.D. addict, so I'd run out my turns on one BBS and then hop to the next.

I used BBSes in Columbus, OH and remember them... fairly vaguely. Not much of a user until the multi-user systems came along, with 8 or even 16 modems at a time, on multiple phone lines -- those were much more interesting.

I remember that in my freshman year of college one of the primary uses of my awesome 10Mbit fiberoptic dorm-room Ethernet connection was to telnet to an open machine at Ohio State that happened to have an outgoing modem that you could use to make local BBS phone calls in Columbus. No password required. Man, those were innocent times on the Internet.

I still find it painfully ironic that I had such great broadband connectivity in college, from 1989 to 1993, when HTTP hadn't been invented yet and all there was to do was FTP, Telnet, and eventually Gopher.