| For me, around age 12 when I started using BBS's in ~1993: 1) I exclusively used it to play door games, mostly LORD, Exitilus, Usurper, and Trade wars 2002. Logged in daily if my parents allowed me. I no longer remember the name of the program I used, just that it was in DOS and I was connecting using... I think it was a 2400 baud modem iirc 2) my oldest brother (15 at the time) was informed about it by one of his friends, and I was the annoying tagalong younger brother who had to join along. 3) My experience was that we logged into a very local BBS, run on 3 lines by some guy who lived in the same city as us. I don't know how many people used the BBS as a whole, but I recall there being a couple hundred Legend of the Red Dragon players. 4) LORD had a bulletin board chat, and it was mostly people bragging or trolling each other. So not too different from gaming chats today, though perhaps a little more tame back then. 5) In the door games, no one talked much about things outside of the game unfortunately. I wish I had thought to check the other features of the BBS when I was of the age when they were still around. |