Welcome to madp0e7ix blog
My thoughts on retrocomputing, electronics, and machine learning research.
2025-01-08
When I was 14 or so years old, I discovered the world of BBS, mIRC, and the internet outside of the controlled access via a web service. I modeled this part of the site after the old BBS (Bulletin Board System) sites that people would host on their own computers, at home. To use one, you'd have to not just know it existed, but also the person's telephone number. You dialed in directly to their system to use the site. If someone else was using it (or they were talking on the line), you couldn't access it and got a busy signal.
It's amazing to think that is how folks connected with each other for years when they wanted to do so via computer. There were services like Prodigy or America Online that acted as portals to the internet, but they didn't offer the same open feel and connection that I found through BBS. They were more sanitized, more polished, and more restricted. "Polished" doesn't sound like a bad thing, and it often wasn't. I spent hours and hours and hours on AOL, burning through the free trial CDs. (You used to get like 10 hours free, and after that they started charging *per hour*! At one point, something like 50% of all compact discs produced were for AOL free trials.)
But they were also pretty limited. You only had access to what they offered through their portal. There was some shopping (though not much back then), some news, and some games and other things that were amazing to discover (after all, this was the first time a computer could do any of this stuff). But, for me, it got old fairly quickly.
Except, of course, for the chat rooms. Even though this was 5 years or so before the release of AOL Instant Messenger, the AOL chat rooms were very active with folks from everywhere. From there, I discovered mIRC, the internet relay chat client that lived outside of the AOL portal. mIRC