[earltedly]

I used to have an Amiga 600 with a 2400 baud modem. I can't remember the name of the BBS I mostly connected to, but the telephone number was just passed around word of mouth.

I lived in Lincolnshire in the UK, a pretty rural county - not very wealthy. It was a local rate number - same area code and it meant free calls. The person who ran it had a pretty big switchboard so could handle about 10-20 connections at once.

The best thing about it was it had a persistent MUD running. You had a character which moved around room to room, slaying monsters but also PvP. If you killed the other person you got all their stuff. One of the problems was if you logged off your character just sat there and would only rudimentarily defend themselves if someone else came along. So you'd need to find somewhere in the middle of nowhere to leave them.

Now the _really_ great thing about this BBS is the owner also had a Compuserve connection. He had it set up so you could trade gold pieces in the MUD game for Compuserve credits - minutes on the _actual_ internet.

I remember finding a logged out player, killing them, getting a jackpot in gold coins and then eagerly spending them to get on Compuserve. It was the first ever time and I didn't really know what to do. I seem to recall their was a directory of _all_ the websites in a big listing with their corresponding index numbers. You could then browse over and take a look.

It felt like some crazy magical sci fi novel at the time. I was about 11 or 12 back then - very early 90s. Just before the blizzard of AOL trial CDs hit the UK.