I definitely feel the nostalgia here. I remember the first time I got a modem in the early '90s and dialed out to a few local BBSes as a teenager. I didn't quite know what they were or what they were for.

It was the most amazing experience to see this text and ASCII/ANSI art appear on my screen that was running off somebody else's computer. It's hard to describe the feeling I got when I realized I was connected to somebody else's computer somewhere within my city. It felt futuristic. At first I felt like I was being watched (possibly) by whoever owned the computer, seeing what I was doing on the system.

Also neat was I was using an IBM PC and some of the BBSes I connected to were using Apple computers or something else. It blew my young mind.

Eventually I ran my own BBS and made my own BBS door games that I made a little bit of money with. I released them as shareware and people would send checks in the mail to me to register the software.

I still have the data from my BBS that I could probably run in DOSBox to log into for old time's sake.