Recently, as I was doing some deep cleaning in my study, I found a warpgate map in my files that I made in the late 80s. I had forgotten all about Tradewars, so that brought back some memories.
I lived in a small town, but there was a service available at the time, a sort of modem gateway network with nodes in a lot of smaller towns. It was a subscription service. Connect to it via a local call, and from there you could dial out to most major cities without paying long distance, and the local node proxied connections over some independent network. It was limited to 1200 baud. I can't remember what it was called.
When I went off to school, I ran a local fidonet point, which basically was a sub-node that could connect to a full fidonet node and collect mail and group messages, and hang up. I could then read and respond at my leisure.
Compuserve eventually replaced Fidonet for me, well before they offered Internet access. I had one of the old numerical IDs.
These days, most BBSs are TCP/IP enabled (ie, telnetbbs). No modem needed. So telnet plus an ANSI terminal emulator would do it. For extra credit, also sniff the stream for a zmodem header and auto download warez.
I lived in a small town, but there was a service available at the time, a sort of modem gateway network with nodes in a lot of smaller towns. It was a subscription service. Connect to it via a local call, and from there you could dial out to most major cities without paying long distance, and the local node proxied connections over some independent network. It was limited to 1200 baud. I can't remember what it was called.
When I went off to school, I ran a local fidonet point, which basically was a sub-node that could connect to a full fidonet node and collect mail and group messages, and hang up. I could then read and respond at my leisure.
Compuserve eventually replaced Fidonet for me, well before they offered Internet access. I had one of the old numerical IDs.