In the early days of home computers and the telephone modem, our phone numbers used to be our URLs. You'd take your C64, plug in a modem into the user port, then connect your phone line to it, and then load up your communications program. Bingo; you're now “on-line”!

I only really got into the whole BBS and SES (software exchange service) once I moved to a larger town for college. The little community I was born and raised in didn't have any local systems that I knew of. But, once at college, I was able to start making my Commodore “connections” and had a few local systems to dial into. Of course, due to my disk trading with friends, I did know about some of the systems in the larger cities, like Toronto. However they were all long distance calls. Those could get very expensive, when all I had was a 300 baud modem. My first modem was the Master Modem, by Video 7. I don't know what happened to it, but it's one of those things I'd like to get back in to my collection some day.

Several of the cracked games that I had loading screens on which the cracking group would brag about their achievements. Sometimes, on these screens, they would also list the phone numbers to their systems. I would look on in amazement and dream about what it would be like to call in to one of these SESes and peruse their gaming libraries. Oh, the wonder and magic of it all.

I didn't get many of my games this way, but I did do a few. Because all of the local systems I called up where all single phone line connections, getting a connection was a challenge most of the time. But, if I tried frequently enough and late enough into the evening, I would make it every so often. And when I did, oh man, it felt like I was Matthew Broderick in the movie “War Games”. Good times!

Today, well it just isn't the same. The all powerful Internet puts just about everything instantly at the end of your finger tips, so there really isn't anything to wonder about; and there is very little magic left in the modern world. I miss that.

Anyway, if there's anyone out there reading this who used to host a Commodore BBS or SES in Ontario, Canada back in the day, let me just say “thanks for the memories”!

211 visitors