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Comment by dccoolgai | Hacker News Reader

This was later adapted into Club Caribe for Q-Link. I regard it as deeply unfair that only those of us born in a brief window of history got to experience the pure magic this represented at the time. It lit up areas of the imagination like nothing before or since.

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No offense to its visionary creators, but to be candid, Club Caribe and Habitat were unappealing to me as a teen, kinda dull in the same way bad VR experiences are to this day. Skimming the paper, it was indeed mostly for the reason highlighted at the top of the paper, I didn’t have great interactions when I visited. The tech alone wasn’t of interest for more than 5 minutes. Straight up text message boards on a topic of interest were better.

The one cool thing from QLink that I miss was chat rooms where the host could control a MIDI playlist taken from endless archives of such things which played in the background while you (text) chatted. I never saw that imitated in the internet era which I always thought was a bit of a shame. Shared discovery, sharing, affinity for music, now there was an enhancement to the otherwise silent experience of BBS-dom. I consider the loss of that capability a sad victim of the MPAA/Napster/RIAA wars. I still think there’s a Spotify/competitor feature hidden there…

Even if you were there at the time and had the equipment, don’t forget how expensive it was for someone to get on the service. I think it’s one of the main reasons (local) BBSes caught on: it was something to do with your $200 1200 bps modem that didn’t cost much

Even relatively local BBSs could rack up the phone charges if you didn't have a very local dial-in. Intra-state long distance wasn't necessarily much cheaper than interstate.

But the hourly charges by a service like Compuserve, especially at higher bit rates, were a lot.

I racked up +$300 in monthly phone charges in my early teens, that was an early and hard lesson of the value of flat fees.

My grandpa disowned me after running up $300 on qlink and another $300 in phone charges to BBSes when I was 12. I talked to him briefly on the phone twice after that in the next decade or so before he died and he never got over it.

Thats kind of depressing to burn a grandkid over a $600 honest mistake.

.. definitely paid around $400 for a modem in the early 90s; 9600 baud with error correction and link safeties

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