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Comment by beamatronic | Hacker News Reader

I got into BBSes when I was in maybe 8th grade. Because we didn't have call waiting, and thus it would tie up the phone line, I could only do BBSing at night. Until I got a long extension cable from Radio Shack, I had to move the computer ( Commodore 64 ) to the dining room table every night when everyone had gone to sleep and I could finally BBS!

I wish there was some way to convey the excitement of getting online back then, and to recapture that magical feeling. Try to imagine sitting at your dining room table in the dead of night, and it's completely silent, except for the (muted) sounds of your modem. And then holding your breath in the hopes that the BBS answers, and you don't get a busy signal. And then finally when those colorful characters started scrolling across the CRT screen... It was magical... I don't have any other word for it.

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My parents got a second line! I can't tell you how awesome that was to this generation nor the trouble I caused. I bought my first modem when I was in 8th Grade.

Oh the things I learned on BBS.

Back then black boxes, free compuserve, phreaking and other nefarious things got allot of my "social group" in trouble. My favorite thing was to try and find a server and figure out who owned it. To bad my friends who were brothers in Virginia. They had all their computer equipment confiscated by the FBI and were national news. One stupid friend (Capt Kirk) took carbon copies of sales at work and bought tens of thousands of dollars through Compuserve for over a year. He got caught at 17 or 18 and was hired for $40,000 to help their security.

I had learned Assembly for cracking purposes at 14 and I didn't have the heart to throw away my two black garbage bags full of floopy disks away till 2004.

Watching the movie War Games knowing I already owned all that equipment was pretty cool when that movie came out.

Funny enough, many BBSs were only open at night. Usually it was because someone only had one line, but also sometimes it was because a kid was hijacking the second line (presumably).

You would think such BBSs would have failed, but many were super popular in spite or even because of it. As a whole though, the bigger and better ones were multi-node and always up though.

You've conveyed it rather well. I was brought up with a C64 but it was the same for me. Having to sneak around to get online when everyone else was in bed...then staying up way too late and getting flak in the morning for still being up and having school in a few hours haha.

BBSses, call waiting, Radio Shack, Commodore 64... Damn man, you hit all the points.

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