I keep pretty quiet about this out of embarrassment (there's stuff from me from when I was like 14 still hiding on the Internet --- I think there's a tfile somewhere where I breathlessly explain how to use `ls`) but if you email me, happy to share. I was an H/P/A/V board scene person. If you knew NBFC or Whammy Bar, you knew my Chicago social scene; if you knew UPT, my actual interests. My silly Chicago BBS was kitted out to look like a Gandalf X.25 router.

>I think there's a tfile somewhere where I breathlessly explain how to use `ls`

You should post a link!

Every once in a while when I'm using a common unix command, I find myself randomly re-encountering the frame of mind that I was in, the world outlook I had, and the sense of amazement I experienced when I first learned it as a kid. A sudden and explicable feeling awe at the breathtaking pervasive power of "cat" or "ls" or "echo" and how they fit together, and the very idea of a shell with commands and files and directories that you could name, look at, change, and move around. Remembering the excitement of discovering and fitting a new important puzzle piece into the growing model of what I was learning.

For me, it was like, I know how to write a DOS batch file, and here's Unix, you can do some of the same things.

I was smarter as an 18 year old than I am now, though! That's a thing my IRC friends from the time constantly talk about today; the people we were when we were shouting each other out in 1990s Phrack issues seem a lot sharper than we are now. We used to hang out and build "protected mode program loaders" for fun. You know, operating systems.

I was in the BBS scene in Baltimore in the mid-to-late 80s and totally relate. I think about some of the things I used to pull off on an Apple //e and then a 286 PC along with school and a job and wonder how I had time to do it.

Youthful energy? Or maybe the limitations of the tech made us work cleverly and thus made us prouder of the result.

I lost all parental credibility the day my kid learned that I used to use "Black Rose" as a BBS alias back in the 90s.

I've got much the same thing re: the "old days". My friends and I wrote a mess of (bad, but for the most part intentionally bad) text files that have mostly disappeared.

UPT! No kidding. That's a blast from the past. Sadly, I only remember a few particular people from that time. I got to meet just a few of them IRL. I was slightly too young to go to the various 'cons, etc, before the Internet came storming-in and killed the BBS scene.

I left home right after high school (not in a bad way!) and wound up going to basically every hacker conference for the next couple years, and a side effect of that is that a lot of those people are still personal friends today. There are good stories about where a lot of those people --- especially the UPT people --- ended up, but a lot of them are skittish about having those connections made and I never know which of them are or aren't sensitive.

We all thought we were pretty cool, but of course, there was an even sub-er subculture that was doing the UPT thing but on BBSs set up on X.25 networks; that's how you get to, for instance, the 8lgm people.

I can understand being skittish about it. We had to have crossed paths back then (though probably not IRL-- I went to a couple of the early DefCon's but that was it). I've mostly lost touch with everybody from "the scene", sadly.

There was a conversation on HN a couple of years ago where somebody posted a particular old X.25 NUA (ending in "..0177") that brought back a flood of memories. There was quite a thrill in "exploring" back then (wardialing, scanning the X.25 networks, messing with voicemail systems, etc). I never did get into that SCO Unix box that purported to be in a local Taco Bell... >smile<

All my childhood embarrassment was on Usenet. Then Google grabbed up all those old Usenet archives and there I was...

Same here. I also ran a local H/P/A/V board (mostly H/P, really) back in the early 90's. I wrote several text files, and collected/distributed 1000's more of them. Fun times.