SuperZZT was a big disappointment though. So many more advanced features than the original, and yet it was ugly and unfun.

I didn't learn about Megazeux until the mid 2000s, unfortunately.

Noted.

I was a few years too late, sometimes after band practice in '94 or '95 we'd all go on IRC since our bass player was on line, but I didn't actually get a modem at home until '96 or so, when it was all about Usenet for software and the web for everything else.

I did read a lot of BBS era text files back then, though. At one point I even surreptitiously printed hard copies of something like 250 pages of CDC files in my school's computer lab so I could read them at home (they had macs and my family had a PC, so saving them on a floppy wasn't really an option).

Oh, and I think I went on the Portal of Evil BBS a few times in 2001 or whenever it was up, but that doesn't count.

I never could afford a modem until the internet came to town. At which point I absolutely had to have one. I did try one local BBS and at least one of my friends had been on them for a while, but I think all they used them for was downloading pirated games.

Yeah somehow my dad had acquired a 14.4kbps modem pretty early on, but the PC was a 286 so it was mostly door games for me. I'd continue to dump my doom wads on there until the late 90s though. I wonder if I can still find 'em..

Yeah, the closest I ever came to actual BBS culture was meeting behind the gym to get a floppy full of of soft porn (maybe 30 320x200x256 scans of old Hustler-or-something photos IIRC) from the one kid whose family had enough money that h could get away with the long distance charges to download it from the Rusty-N-Eddie BBS back in 9th grade.

Kids these days don't know how easy they have it.

The 286 was plenty to play ZZT though.

Which has nothing to do with BBSes but consumed a fair amount of my life in 6th or 7th grade.

The last time I moved, I went through some computer stuff and found my soft porn floppy discs. I grew up in the middle of nowhere with a terrible Internet connection, so those topless pictures of Pamela Anderson were hard won. Had plenty of BBS-era text files, too, and I found those with the porn. It was pretty neat to feel like you were in possession of some kind of forbidden knowledge that you'd acquired yourself, acquiring that feeling takes a lot more work for me now. Some of that writing was pretty funny, too. I haven't revisited it, but I remember edgy, young me loving "I Bleed For This?" and that kinda stuff. Who knows if I'd feel that way now, but I was sure into it then.

I didn't frequent any BBS's, just IRC and later, a couple online games. I wouldn't know it by using IRC now, though, as I've forgotten every command as if they were never a part of my brain...

TOTSE and BMUG in the mid-90s

ZZT was the shit! I used to make my own impossible ZZT clones in GBasic, most of the levels reflecting my taste in industrial music when I was 13. BBS and FTP totally ruined porn for me though. I was fine with my one picture of Alissa Milano from Poison Ivy 2 and a (I think) photoshopped Terri Hatcher, but then my friend came over and showed me some REAL telnet porn!! Anyway we clicked through and it was this girl who was a senior at our high school with about 5 dicks in her face. :(

I remember making the mistake of downloading a JPG posted with the subject "Bill and Monica in the Oval Office" off Usenet back in the 90s just to see what sort of bullshit it actually was.

Nastiest Japanese vomit porn I've ever had the misfortune of seeing, and I learned the lesson that being able to identify an act of trolling doesn't mean it won't still get you.