The first real programming I did was writing games and mods for the Color64 BBS I ran when I was about 12. It was actually an interesting and modern design, I now realize...its main loop was in assembly while the apps and forum and other stuff was in BASIC, making it, effectively, a scriptable system (live scriptable, even, since you could change things on the running system). It was also a somewhat multi-user system, in that a sysop could interact with users while they were on the system. The reason it wasn't all written in BASIC was that BASIC wasn't fast enough to serve a 2400 baud connection (I believe disk routines also had some reason for being in assembly, as well), much less the 38,400 modems supported by Swiftlink.

That old C64, and the BBS culture, shaped me and my life profoundly. I should probably send Greg Pfountz (the author of Color64) a nice thank you email, if I can figure out how to reach him.

The source and manual for Color64 were released years ago, and the manual is an interesting read in terms of understanding the architecture and seeing how advanced a system could be on such a tiny machine.

I wrote a full VT/ANSI BBS client for the C64 using 6502 assembler and it was one of the fastest around. I never commercialised it, but it became something of an underground hit in the UK at the time.

The software was noteworthy because it ran in graphics mode with its own set of fonts and also (just about) managed to juggle printing AND still handling the serial comms, which was made super-difficult by the way port interrupts and I/O were handled on the C64.

I bet one of these are him:

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/greg-pfountz/5/41a/4a1

https://twitter.com/gpfountz

This blurry image (http://i53.tinypic.com/2janfrd.jpg) from 1988 has some nostalgia. ($10 1988 dollars are about $18 2011 dollars.)

Compuserve, charging $11 per hour, had "more than 250,000 subscribers".

The Source, charging $8 per hour, was popular for its conferencing system "parti".

Delphi, charging $6 per hour had a loyal but small (less than 10,000 users) following.

BIX, $9 per hour, grew from a magazine.

Notable quote:

> "This is the computer industry as it used to be: people sharing ideas and solutions without the greed and grit with associated with today's corporate driven, litigation-laced, industry" (this was written over 20 years ago).

Also notable is Quantum Link ($9.95/mo) - originally for the C64 and C128 - which later became America Online.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Link

I was too poor for a C64 and we had a party line :(

Actually I had the C64 because I was too poor to afford the Mac! (this was the mid 80s)

My uncle got an Apple the small all-in-one type with the small screen whatever model that was.

I should say I got an ATARI 600XL but that wasn't until about 1984 it was probably on sale.

Not bad though I wrote out BASIC code from Family Computing magazine but had a hard time getting it to work so many syntax errors I couldn't find.