I miss the scene too... Once, calling a pop. BBS' here in Milw. (14.4K) I found out an 'online buddy' was a co-worker of mine! We became great friends...
I bought my first Amiga from a local CNet BBS sysop in 815 (area code). I was in high school, it was 1996, the computer was a rev 6.2 A2000HD, 68000, with a partially fried ICD AdRAM board
That Amiga replaced my 486sx/25 for all daily operations and eventually went with me to college! (And followed me when I dropped out because I couldn't use it to do my Java homework
)
So there you have it, if it wasn't for BBSes I wouldn't have bought an Amiga and thus wouldn't have dropped out of college. Simple as that.
