Then you realise that this happened 30 year ago and then you feel old. At least I do.

I used to use a bbs offline "mail" client called blue wave, and it would import .qwk files from the bbs, then you spent your time replying offline and in the end would upload a .rep package containing said replies.

In some ways I miss it but in other ways I have a 500/500 internet fiber connection now and do not miss the days when donloading a 10 mb file took the rest of the day.

I had to pay hourly for CRIS BBS Direct's 1-800 dialup because everything was long distance to me, and keep detailed usage records so I didn't exceed my teenage income. 25 hours of Internet usage in a month was "a lot" then, now I think I use it 18 hours a day.

Dialing up every morning, exchanging QWK/REP files, getting off as soon as possible was my first forte into scripting things.

I saw a review of Incredibles 2 which opened with "you may remember the original from when you were a kid"

Sigh.

Mid 90s, summer break. I had dialup to a BBS/ISP hybrid from which I could telnet to my university account. I randomly found the source code for uqwk on the server. It compiled. It worked. uqwk built a file of new mail and usenet posts. Then I zmodemed them back to my computer where I wrote some software to split them up and read them at my leisure. Not sure if I ever get posting working or not.

Yep, same on CiX in the UK. We had to pay for phone access by the minute, so an offline reader was absolutely necessary.

Same here in Norway. I remember being jealous of people in the US with a flat local rate. We paid by the minute for everything, even more for "long" distance. My father got rather upset when we got a phone bill of 5000 NOK back in the day because I had downloaded something from a BBS in Bergen from Oslo.

Funny how things have reversed, now we are the ones with unmetered fast internet and the US has datacaps and whatnot.

Did CiX also charge per-minute access on top of that? Compuserve did.

In the late 90s, pre DSL, there was a pressure group to allow unmetered phone calls. The site is still online: http://www.unmetered.org.uk/

Blue Wave was amazing. I vividly remember many of the discussions I had with folks at the time - particularly on assembly, demoscene, and electronics. Learned a ton, and it helped shape my entire career.

RIGHT!?

I remember the late 80s and early 90s as an absolutely wondrous time; using the computer as a means of connecting to someone else somewhere else was a little bit mind blowing.

I just spent a few minutes going down memory lane looking at the BBB's on this site: http://bbslist.textfiles.com/503/ remembering some of the door games I used to play.