[r_klancer]

The headline put me in mind of a different memory I had of the campus BBS from undergraduate days, and then I clicked through and realized that the author was actually the admin of that BBS!

Anyway, in addition to the BBS there was also an IBM mainframe (?) running VM/SP that you could connect to, and somehow that was how you got to IRC.

One night several of us spent hours chatting on IRC, and the next day we got called into the campus computing service where it was patiently explained that some professor's overnight batch job running stats had failed because it was constantly being interrupted by interactive-priority jobs ... i.e., our chat sessions. Which we should now stop.

I remember writing a passionate open letter using my vague knowledge that had trickled out about "hacker culture" in places like Berkeley where students were surely right now exploring these new things called "Usenet" and "the Internet", arguing that even though we weren't doing anything fancy like running stats for an economics paper, and even though we didn't know what any of it would actually amount to, the important thing for our education was that we had the chance to experiment with it for ourselves...