[bemmu]

I used to be a sysop and made some of my deepest friendships that way. One-to-one chatting via fullscreen realtime updated text with no other distraction has some magical quality to it that makes you talk about all manner of things in depth with another person.

[bonniemuffin]

I used to play a ton of MajorMud, half to chat with other people while we played, and half to script it so our characters could keep playing while we were all at school. I met my husband on a BBS, and here we are all these years later. Plain text chat with local strangers in your area code is truly magical.

[noufalibrahim]

I got onto the net in the late 90s and discovered IRC soon after. I developed several nice friendships over freenode other IRC servers. Like you said, typing on a terminal without any distractions had a uniquely magical quality.

I've put it down to nostalgia but things like slack and other popular modern tools just don't have the pull which IRC had for me.

[discobean]

I started coding by doing C for ProBoard BBS plugins! I wrote SMURf CHaT back in 97!

http://archives.thebbs.org/ra119a.htm

I remember when I encountered my first smilie on chat :)

Those were the days :D