nice! I made lifelong friends through it. I liked running experiments.
One of my favorite experiments was running a BBS I called “FREE SPEECH!” and it was based on a weird piece of software from some guy in Canada. You probably ran across his work before in Shareware; he made some text manipulation tools that were nice but I can’t think of his name.
Pinnacle BBS was his and the BBS was just like one gigantic text file basically. People could login and say anything anonymously and logoff.
I ran the experiment two different times for about 9 months each a piece.
it would get these long rambling posts about all kinds of subjects. Sometimes people would just be rude on it and call out people they didn’t like. Some just put nazi symbols up or other ascii art, etc.
But it was neat and found its place in local BBS lore for a while.
Other experiments were a Waffle BBS which I pulled usenet posts in and gave everybody an email address, which was very new to the area.
I think my first BBS was either a weird “Pyroto Mountain” or a Spitfire BBS,
I did get on Fidonet once or twice. I found it was awkward to work with but I did it just to see if I could.