Appreciation post: The dial-up BBS that still answers in 2024
Last Tuesday I dialed into a local BBS from 1996 using an old US Robotics modem I dug out of my dad's closet. The sysop still runs it off a Pentium machine in his basement, and the message board had posts from this week. Has anyone else gotten a forgotten site or server to boot up and actually work after years of silence?
The part about the message board having posts from this week is what gets me, because that means there's a whole little community still showing up every day on hardware older than most of the people posting. I bet half of them found it through a telnet gateway and never even touch a real modem. There's something great about a machine that just keeps running because one guy never unplugged it, no cloud bill, no update that breaks everything. I've got an old router in the garage I'm now tempted to fire up just to see what's still on it.