─── pull up a chair · stay a while ───
A at the first screen to apply for an account.
telnet oldtimebbs.com 23Before the web, people “went online” by dialing another computer over a phone line. A bulletin board system was usually one hobbyist's PC with a modem: callers posted messages, swapped files, and played games, one caller per phone line at a time. The first one, CBBS, went up in Chicago in 1978, built by Ward Christensen and Randy Suess while a blizzard kept them home. By the early 1990s there were tens of thousands of them, linked by networks like FidoNet that passed mail between boards overnight.
Old Time BBS is a working one, kept running as a living exhibit for a History of Computing class. The modem is now a telnet connection, but the experience is the real thing: 80×25 text screens, ANSI art drawn in the IBM PC character set, and conversations that unfold over days instead of seconds.