On 25 Jul 2021, August Abolins said the following...
 
 AA> I was bit leary about ICQ when it first came out. But it proved  
 AA> to be a fine communications medium to stir up a "live" chat  
 AA> with someone at any time of the day.

I remember that feature of ICQ, where you could pick a random chat partner in a
specific country or who spoke a specific language.

When I signed up to ICQ I had a 5 digit ICQ number but then ended up forgetting
my password to it, when I signed back up I was issued a 6 digit number, which
was kind of a bummer.

This was when I was still in high school, one of my friends joked that he was
going to get his ICQ number printed on a t-shirt, which I though was an
interesting idea.  Those were simpler times...

 EV> In a Computer Store I picked up a FREE Newletter and saw a
 EV> List of Dial-Up BBS's and called one of them that had
 EV> Topics about DOS and Windows so I could learn about those
 EV> OS's.

You know, I worked in a computer store and never thought to try and advertise
there.  I don't really remember how I first came to learn about BBS's though,
just that the first board I dialed into was Prime Time BBS in Gravenhurst,
Ontario which was a multi-line PCBoard BBS.

 AA> My first real awareness of BBSes to call in my local area was  
 AA> courtesy of Boardwatch magazine.  Then, it was a matter of  
 AA> getting a good LD plan to check out some of the ones farther  
 AA> away.   A little later, I gravitated towards Compuserve.

There were a couple of boards one town over in Huntsville which was still long
distance back then.  Someone started a service where you could dial a local
number to a town in between the two, listen to a short advertisement and then
get a dialtone to call into Huntsville as a local call.

It was in the latter stage of BBS'ing when my family got London Telecom and I
was able to dial long distance BBS's more often, one of my favourites was run by
a nice fellow named Shawn Highfield... 


Jay

... The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/07/23 (Raspberry Pi/32)
 * Origin: Northern Realms (618:500/23)