Ah, this brought a lot of memories back. I remember meeting the sysop of "Alternate Reality" because I needed an ISA IDE interface board, and he had one "somewhere" he said. I was a teen, 15 or 16, and when I went to his house I met a slovenly man in his 20's or 30's ("old" to then me) and he had the goods, and I paid him.

Later on I got into a 'l33t' BBS through a guy at work and I got the first 28.8k modem of anybody I knew, from him. In retrospect, I'm pretty sure it fell off a truck at some point before I got it.

And then there was the time I started my own BBS. The local paper (1995ish) published a technology column every Monday, and I wrote in about my BBS. I got one call from that, from somebody who figured out that they'd mixed up the last two numbers. sigh.

I never BBS'd after that, but the early days of Prodigy, AOL, and BBS's set me up for much of who I am and what I still do to this day.