I just want to know who was playing Gemstone III.
I ran a BBS in the early 90’s - the Boston Eye. I was an optometry student in Boston, Ma. My girlfriend HATED the sound of phone calls in the middle of the night! Ran it on an old Quantus XT, an IBM XT Clone, running an 8088 processor, and 1 MB of ram, a 400 MB hard drive, and a tape back up system for all the offline files!
I think i remember that one… spent loads of time on Channel1 back in those days too.
My very first “online experience” was to connect a Radio Shack MC-10 (kind of an 8-bit ZX-81 clone with 16k memory) to a phone line and connect to a computer shop 20 miles away. No interaction, but you could read stuff they put up on the screen of your TV.
I ran The Rabbit Hole BBS in Fort Worth, TX. It had all the standard features of a BBS plus HPVAC content. I had 4 lines with 1 that would outbound to the Internet for MUDs or IRC. At its peak I was running a DIY 486DX4/100MHz with I think 4MB of RAM running Windows 3.11 and Wildcat! BBS, and it was networked to a no-name box with a 386SX/20MHz set up as the modem controller. To that I had 4 V-Tech (I think they were V-Tech!?) 28.8kbps EISA modems. Later I downsized to a 2 line system, got rid of the 386 and used 2 USRobotics v.90 external modems which [unlike the shit companies sell today and never support] got firmware updates to v.92 and then v.everything. I was an official distro for Pirates With Attitude, Realease On Rampage, and a few other piracy groups. I was also a member of NuKE, S.W.A.T. and LaME! elite underground groups. I was focused mostly on viri coding but also dabbled in cracking. I used to love punting newbies out of IRC. Good memories!