Edited by author 09-18-2003 06:19 AM
Good plan! Where did the discuss links go and why?
OBbbs: I think I came in late to the BBS scene, but I blame that on growing up in Shrewsbury in the UK. For those that don't know Shrewsbury (that's most of you) the best way I can describe it in computer terms is that it was like growing up in a giant urban equivalent of a infinitally large field full of geology teachers.
Anyway, through a range of interlinking underground tunnels that acted as a secret passway to somewhere more exciting (but only just) I managed to get hold of a magazine called "Imagine" which was produced by math teachers and came at a time when mixing articles about puzzles, text adventure games, early computer games and "Create your own story/path game books" didn't seem so odd.
Each month in that magazine there was a multi-page spread about the latest goings on in a MUD (I assumed it was the only one that existsed!). Now to someone who was generally surrounded by people going "look at the exciting rock composition of that hill" a text adventure game where many different people played at once sounded like a dream come true, much better than playing
Castle of Riddles on your own.
I also played
Car Wars from
Steve Jackson Games on the back page of the instruction booklet it mentioned "join us on our Illuminati Online BBS". (and get busted I guess).
I digress, each night I dreamt about somehow connecting to other computers. Now I knew the math teachers had modems, but the geology teachers only had small hammers which just wasn't any good. There was only one thing for it...
...escape to University! I had a friend who'd escaped the infinite field the year before, when I'd gone to visit she showed me this room, it was small, dark, open 24 hours, accessed by using a small ID card, full of VT100 terminals glowing green and orange and, well, smelt slighty odd. I instantly fell in love and knew what I had to do.
Next year I was all packed and ready to go, 14 pairs of knickers, 8 vest tops, 1 CD walkman, 6 crates of Mountain Dew and a can of Air Freshener. I was set.
Now I ended up at Staffordshire University. This place has something of a history in UK computers, they did big things and great discoveries here (so I was told), they had banks of Mainframes all down in Staffordshire. The place was full of 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of your typical computer geeks and about a few 1000 more electronics students and ummmm... about 3 gurls, they moved all the nurses up about 3 years later to redress the balance.
So I joined in the local Uni MUD and was of course showered with swords and shields and scrolls and spells and visits to LARs basement. I was Queen, no, Goddess of the MUD, adored by all, I loved the ascii text churned out by the blinking green cursor and it loved me back. I signed up to io.com, I discovered The Hive BBS (a telnet BBS based up in Glasgow), the Foothills BBS followed as I started to drift around the world, in-dial, out-dial, gopher and pad. I found
phrack (of course) and
The Unplastic News that I'd send to the dot matrix so I could take it back to halls to read.
I'd finially done it, I'd escaped the big wide open green fields and found the small dark hot sweaty terminal rooms, I was free!
