Reply #12: Back in the day ...

[RoyGBiv]

I "acquired" access to a telnet line that allowed me to access a lot of things I wouldn't have been able to access without quite a lot of cost. This was the major consideration at the time in even setting up a BBS. To get one that was full-featured -- I had a lot of games and other things, aka, "DOORS" -- you had to get a lot of different software from large BBS repositories. I started doing that at 1200 baud, and it took forever.

That telnet line helped a lot.

It's funny, though, how a user base can be built. I lived in a town with about 12,000 people in it. At the time I first started BBS-ing, which was well before I had my own, a very small percentage of the residents had computers, but every last one of them who also had a modem -- this of course wasn't universal at the time -- was on that BBS, the *one* BBS in town. It was run by a guy who himself knew people like Cap'n Crunch, and they hung out there some as well. He got tired of it eventually, and the whole user base got passed off to some kid who had no idea what he was doing (and was an asshole), and after that several of us pooled resources to try to reestablish the thriving community we had before.

We ended up with 3 different BBSes in that town. I had one of them. The user base for all of them was the same, which worked well because we ran single-line systems, so if someone called one of them and got a busy signal, they could call another one. We also shared costs for the FidoNet portion of our systems. (I'd lost the Telnet access. For some reason, the people that ran it decided they needed tighter security. Can't imagine why.) I'd pull messages for these groups, another guy would pull for those groups, and then we'd run a secondary toss to each other so we all had the same thing.

Anyway ... yeah, I miss those days.