My secret life as an 11-year-old BBS sysop

#106 · 🔥 233 · 💬 95 · one year ago · arstechnica.com · pwg · 📷
Thirty years ago last week-on November 25, 1992-my BBS came online for the first time. The Cave BBS soon grew into a bustling 24-hour system with over 1,000 users. While commercial online services like CompuServe and Prodigy existed then, many hobbyists ran their own miniature online services called bulletin board systems, or BBSes for short. Whereas the Internet is a huge connected web of systems with billions of users, most BBSes were small hobbyist fiefdoms with a single phone line, and only one person could call in and use it at a time. Not long after my dad brought home the modem, he handed off a photocopied list that included hundreds of BBS numbers from our 919 area code in North Carolina. With modem in hand, my older brother-about five years older than me-embraced calling BBSes first. Since most BBSes only had one phone line, you didn't want to hog the line for too long or the sysop might boot you.
My secret life as an 11-year-old BBS sysop



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