I used BBSes in Columbus, OH and remember them... fairly vaguely. Not much of a user until the multi-user systems came along, with 8 or even 16 modems at a time, on multiple phone lines -- those were much more interesting.
I remember that in my freshman year of college one of the primary uses of my awesome 10Mbit fiberoptic dorm-room Ethernet connection was to telnet to an open machine at Ohio State that happened to have an outgoing modem that you could use to make local BBS phone calls in Columbus. No password required. Man, those were innocent times on the Internet.
I still find it painfully ironic that I had such great broadband connectivity in college, from 1989 to 1993, when HTTP hadn't been invented yet and all there was to do was FTP, Telnet, and eventually Gopher.
I remember that in my freshman year of college one of the primary uses of my awesome 10Mbit fiberoptic dorm-room Ethernet connection was to telnet to an open machine at Ohio State that happened to have an outgoing modem that you could use to make local BBS phone calls in Columbus. No password required. Man, those were innocent times on the Internet.
I still find it painfully ironic that I had such great broadband connectivity in college, from 1989 to 1993, when HTTP hadn't been invented yet and all there was to do was FTP, Telnet, and eventually Gopher.