[erichanson]

I ran a BBS in the 90s, nothing big but it had a small local community, some of them just users (lusers) and some of the sysops of other boards. I only had one phone line but call waiting would just kick the user off if I got a call. It was really easy to one up, I was running Renegade but there were quite a few different systems that you just basically turn on and you're up. I spent way too much time customizing each menu with ANSI art for each menu and trying to pimp out the UX. There were multiplayer games and file boards and message boards and you could live-chat with the sysop or other users if the board had multiple phone lines. My buddy called long distance to Kansas to some warez board to download a paint program and ran up a huge phone bill. It was magical and so much fun. Internet still has not achieved that kind of decentralized p2p in the mainstream. Plug a Raspberry Pi into your cable modem and build your own little board, give access to whoever you want. Would be pretty cool to me, but I don't know if I'm just old and nostalgic or if anybody else would actually want to do it. But yeah, wild wild west was the best.

[ipaddr]

I ran a small board. Was fun but tried to do too much on 1541 (mods (games), and messages). I miss the 800 backdoors people put on party lines on. Hitting a newspaper box in a certain spot so it would open free. BBS meetups. War dialing. Local zines that were really cool programs

[epcoa]

There were private FTP and IRC bots, DC++, etc. Private Minecraft and other game servers are still pretty common.

> Internet still has not achieved that kind of decentralized p2p in the mainstream.

BBSes were never mainstream. Personal computing in the 80s and early 90s was not mainstream. This is the insurmountable problem in trying to recapture that experience.