| 1. I would login to my favorites daily. I ran my own BBS (using the Renegade BBS software) as a teenager, so would monitor that as well. I think I landed on QModem after using Telix. 2. I knew friends who used them but we had the RIBBS list (Rhode Island BBS List). What was amusing at the time (90s) is that despite Rhode Island being the smallest state, there were still "local long distance" calls that cost money to make, so you had to be aware of what numbers you were able to call for free. 3. "Boards" were the terms we used, the term "server" was not in use that I know of for BBS host machines (despite them being essentially servers). There were definitely more popular ones, but also ones that served specific niches (photography, gaming, role playing). One of the more popular ones in RI got shutdown for hosting pirated games. The pirate stuff was never visible to my account, though they did advertise having GB of files available. This amount of data was huge compared to the 120MB hard drive I had at the time. 4. The vibe was variable based on the BBS. My impression was that the early internet had a better vibe than BBSes, because they were relatively small and regional you mostly got the discussion that was happening in your own locale. National BBSes were certainly a thing as well as services like GEnie and CompuServe, but those weren't something I frequented. 5. Honestly, I didn't see a lot of programming discussion. I am sure it was there, but I wasn't seeking it out. From a technical standpoint, a lot of it was talking about the new hardware of the day and also discussing BBS operation and configuration. |