I was about 12 years old maybe 13 at the time and I forget a lot of the people that visited but I had a great time running it and learning how to set things up. I ran a few different brands of software but the last I remember is teleguard. I made some good friends via the bbs and was an early user of Fidonet.
Two of my friends and I spent many hours in my parents basement setting things up and calling other BBS’s around the world. I was lucky that my parents let me get a dedicated phoneline just for the BBS and to use to call into other BBS’s but that quickly became an issue when I had a $300 phone bill! We weren’t well off and it was a big hit to my parents and me since I was paying for the phoneline with money I made from odd jobs around the neighborhood. It got my computer privileges revoked for several months and a good old ass whooping if I remember correctly.
The area I was in had a loose network of BBS’s that would forward mail and sync. The sysops of those BBS’s were all older than I was but treated me well and included my ideas and my friends ideas in planning and setting things up.
A few years went by and I was getting interested in some government BBS’s like NASA who had an interface for data from the voyager prob and some ARPANET sites that I stumbled upon while poking around a local college campus computer lab. I ended up getting caught on (I can’t remember if it was a BBS or on ARPANET) The navel nuclear safety laboratory computer system. I didn’t get in trouble with the navy for that but they wanted to know how I got in and had me walk them through everything I did but I did get IN BIG trouble from my parents who took away the computer and made me take down the BBS.
I think I was about 16 or 17 when they took away the computer and the older guys that ran the other local BBS’s were just starting to build what would be the first local ISP. They had asked me to help with it in return for being a part of the company. I had to turn them down and in the end after being very successful those guys sold the ISP to a national company for millions of dollars. Funny how life works out sometimes. I can’t complain I ended up joining the local fire department and went to make a career out of that.
I’m a bit too young for that specific part of Internet history, but if you have any additional info and docs, this could make a great post on medium or some place like that. Super interesting!
I may have something left from back then but I doubt it. My memory isn’t that great anymore either. I hung onto the computer I ran the BBS on for a long time but with multiple moves and living on a boat for a couple of years I ended up trashing it along the way.