The Underground Subway

It was an oldschool institution before I appeared on the local cyber-scape - and that was over half of my lifetime ago. It would not be until years later (perhaps sometime in '98) that I would encounter the hand-me-down SysOp, a fourty-something bus driver, at a 2600 meet. The board itself was (and remains) a lovingly hand-crafted ensemble of scripts, password prompts and the elitest of hardcore text-files, pre-dating ease-of-use bbs softwares like Telegard or Renegade - it was all cobbled together manually, and it worked. I never got too far into it - as a twelve-year-old, I was too impatient to work my way through the riddles and logic puzzles of the automated access-accruing scheme, peeling back board beneath board in an attempt to find the real elites, but picking up the telephone just now my heart melted to hear what sounded like a 2400 answer tone waiting for me.

It waits also for you, at 604-590-1147.

Because by and large it has been forgotten, however, it lacks the community you feel you seek. Thus, I have something else for you I came across the last time I felt this search coming over myself about a year ago:

Milky Way BBS at (604) 532-4362, -4367, -4371 and -4377 is a fourteen-year-old's (at least, this one's) dream. Hundreds of online games, all buzzing, all registered, all packed with activity. The board has four nodes and they are all busy with the BBS's unique niche audience: fourteen-year-olds whose parents don't allow their children Internet access. A small and dying breed, but vicious (even perhaps virulent in this context - it contains what seem to be entire graduating classes from certain schools, resultant in the establishment of them-vs-us cliques to which we are doomed to be an irrelevant outsider).

Play hard, and rack up a long distance bill like nobody's business.

Update: October 2006 -- the BBSes are no longer in service. What can I say? You missed your chance, though all things considered, it wouldn't have even occurred to most sane people concerned to have given it a shot for most of the past decade. They would more likely have looked up The Search for a Good Old Fashioned phpBB (... the fools!)

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