[megax]

It’s amazing to see that many of us on this thread share the same experience and passion for BBSs! I was a 13-year-old SysOp myself, running a heavily modified instance of WWIV (later transitioned to Renegade) on two dedicated lines that were hosted on an IBM 8088 my dad got from a liquidation sale. I was also part of a couple of ANSI art groups, and loved using TheDraw and ACiD Draw. We also made l33t animations in Assembler where the goal was to produce incredibly complex animations with the smallest possible file size (<10kb).

Does does anyone remember extenders that folks used to “extend their area code”? My dad’s company was nice enough to let me use it occasionally, but I remember that many were released and traded illegally by the phreaker community.

Edit: Edited last sentence/question for clarity

[jtaft]

What’s an extender?

[megax]

An extender is designed to be used for making phone calls without directly billing the caller. Most mid-size and large companies that operated from multiple cities/countries used them.

Extenders connect to a PBX that is normally exposed via a toll free number (1-800), or a local number that allows the user to dial out to long distance numbers without incurring long distance connection charges.

It’s basically how prepaid long distance cards work nowadays: You dial a number, enter a code, get a dial tone, then dial your long distance number to connect.