jiberish

Thank you, Ward Christensen. RIP. I was just commenting on another thread earlier today, recounting my nostalgia for dialing into a small BBS after school and talking to my friends.

I thought the same thing when I was looking at the first volume! It was a really weird time to grow up in. I was about 12-14 when my friends introduced me to BBSes. We had a main one that was really small and you could only stay online for a short period of time every day for free, so we would try to catch each other there after school. I can’t remember how many concurrent users it supported, but maybe it was 8. There were a few bigger ones we would use too after our minutes ran out. The news paper had a BBS as well that supported a lot of people, but it didn’t have fun games or other kids to talk to, so that one was boring.

There were women that used the BBS regularly. I went on a blind date with a girl at a pizza place. Her friends were there too and it was about as uncomfortable as a blind date can be. I also became friends with a girl at my school from the BBS. We talked online and realized we had some classes together. I was surprised she was into such a nerdy hobby at the time because she was a cheerleader and a “cool kid.”

The craziest BBS memory for me is that, 10 years ago, someone at my work recognized me from a BBS. A lady stopped me when I was walking to the break room and said she knew me and my friends from back in the day. I didn’t remember her or all the details of the BBSes that she was talking about, but she threw out names of a lot of people. She was one of the older teenagers that hung out online. Some of those kids would have IRL meetups at pizza places and stuff. We didn’t really interact much online with the older kids, but we knew a little bit about them and they knew about us. You definitely wanted to talk to everyone and figure out who they were and if they were someone you could be get along with. New users were exciting.

I miss that old era. I remember the day that our main BBS had a connection to “The Internet”. I didn’t know what it meant at the time. But I think it basically connected you to IRC or something similar. You could join hundreds of chat rooms and talk to so many people. It was overwhelming. Up until then, I only talked to people in my city/area code. Sometime later my family signed up for an internet provider (never AOL thankfully). There was a period of overlap where I would log into the old BBS after using up my daily minutes on my family’s dial up internet plan.

Tildes sounds intriguing. I will check it out.

I love that you have old BBS magazines. What a weird wave of nostalgia that was.

@creative_explained

I am still running an FX-8320 and it’s fast enough for everything that I need it for. It baffles me to see people arguing about the differences between different Ryzen CPUs.

As someone who modded his controller with metal buttons. Instant regret. It is not comfortable for extended gaming sessions.

I received a chain e-mail saying that If I mail the person who sent me this $1 and forward the e-mail to all my entire contact list, I will be a millionaire. There are hundreds of email addresses in the body of this email from all the forwards that have happened before it was forwarded to me. How cool! Unrelated: how are all these spammers getting my email address? I only gave it to all my friends and family. And my friends/family only send me cool chain emails and funny jokes. e-mail is a new technology, so surly they will fix this spam problem by the year 2000.

Seriously, as an IT person, I still never know what most of my USB ports are capable of, but I'm glad they are backwards compatible. If something is slow, then I try a different cable and port.

The similarities between Happy Fun Ball and Elon's childhood car drawing are SHOCKING (because both will likely electrocute the user)

We’re not buying the game, we’re buying the fantasy that we have the free time to play the game. I heard someone say that about books they bought and didn’t read. You can apply this reasoning to explain a lot of similar spending people do.

“Quack” ended up being “cock”. Very clearly articulated. Every bird he sees is a “COCK!” It made our lakeside vacation interesting.

It’s a simple word that’s easy to say. When my son was just picking up words, he heard us say “the batteries are about to die” and he copied it immediately. Then all night, it was “die die die die die”