[dphase]

I hate that the majority (I assume) here on HN didn't get to cut their teeth in the BBS era, you really missed out.

I see comments below mentioning "breaking into computer systems" -- you have to realize this was an era pre-Google, pre-www, in a lot of people's cases, pre-Usenet even. We were often limited to 60 minutes of access daily to a BBS, fighting busy signals to even get a node. Using every minute of that time to download textfiles, download cool stuff from the demo scene (sometimes with the pleasure of compiling them with TASM). We didn't have Linux boxes piled up in the back, to learn and explore Unix, many, like myself, had to fire up a war dialer, find a system, and use those crazy textfiles we read from our local BBS to work our way around. It wasn't, in most cases, for nefarious means -- it was our only option.

It was a great, great era. Hard to understand if you weren't there. Do yourself a favor and check out a few old boards that are still available through telnet. It's not the same, but you'll get an idea.

(I guess this response officially puts me in the "get off my lawn" club!)

[pxlpshr]

Couldn't agree more... it was the frontier days.

I grew up in rural Texas about :45 minutes away from Houston. I ran a BSS for my neighborhood around the time of Duke Nukem 3D. We traded our custom maps over it, and coordinated our bamboo fort building plans for the summer so our parents didn't know where it was located.

We also got our hands on the anarchist cookbook and remember Hacker Manifesto being circulated everywhere. And a time when aliases matured into leetness like .oOo. Silicon Toad .oOo.

Then we got our first taste of mass internet with AOL, visual basic war proggies, and IRC scripts like teardrop.c and port attacks on Windows 95... and it's been downhill ever since. :)

Oh the memories...

[dphase]

Silicon Toad! Completely forget about that name. Lots of fun groups back then, actually writing interesting code instead of useless antics likes DDoS and website defacement.

[p4bl0]

Your comment made me think of Telehack [1] and Textfiles [2].

"Telehack is a simulation of a stylized arpanet/usenet, circa 1985-1990. It is a full multi-user simulation, including 25,000 hosts and BBS's the early net, thousands of files from the era, a collection of adventure and IF games, a working BASIC interpreter with a library of programs to run, simulated historical users, and more." [3]

Textfiles is an archives of, well, text files.

[1] http://telehack.com/

[2] http://textfiles.com/

[3] http://telehack.com/telehack.html

[dphase]

I absolutely love textfiles.com -- their BBS documentary was amazing. This is the first time I've come across telehack, very cool. I look forward to playing with it more when I get some freetime.

[olgeni]

And what about the happy times of FidoNet and GoldEd and the dreaded FOSSIL drivers...

[nicholassmith]

I missed the BBS era and came in around the point where if you had a Windows machine you had to know some cmd magic to get certain things to work (dodgy shareware Doom floppies is the one I remember best), but it seems like it's a missing skill now.