It is hard to believe that my parents let me do this unsupervised. It was like the equivalent of allowing your kid to spend all day on social media and doing who-knows-what (however, there were no pictures, just text). But they did, and in my case, it was the right thing to do.

 Like many teen SysOps, I learned how to put together computers from parts: hard drives, floppy drives, and graphics cards. My BBS ran on an 8086 XT with a 5 MB hard drive. I paid for the parts and phone line by doing tech support for a local business.

I never ran a 2400 baud modem. As a believer in premium experiences, I had used a minimum of 9600 out of the gate.

After a while, I upgraded to the super-fast 56.7k modem.