When 300 baud was the bomb

Fri, 31 May 2002 19:30:00 +0000

Back in the day, there were boards. Bulletin Board Systems. BBS's. No Net, no Web, no cyberspace, nothing. Just boards, and their ugly stepchildren, D-Dials. All strung together with phone lines, hand-rolled software, and 8-bit computers. No backbone, no hubs, no routers, no DNS tables. Just one computer picking up the phone, calling another, and having a little chat.

Back in the day, I was in Jersey. I don't know if it was the center of the BBS world; it was probably the ass-end of it, like it was of everything else. But it felt like the center. I was 12, and hanging out on a board called the Oriental Express, where the average age had to be 25 if it was a day. I lied, sometimes, and said I was 13. Thirteen was respectable; it at least had that 'teen' in it. I was just rounding, I figured. For years, I got used to being the youngest person in any virtual room I entered.

Salon.com > N.Z. Bear

When 300 baud was the bomb