Oy, this is gonna make me feel old ...

I first went "online" at sixteen in 1983 with a 110bps modem that could "turbo" to 300bps if the service supported it. To put this in perspective, today's dial-up is 56,000bps -- at 110bps you have to wait for each letter to appear on the screen ... the 80x25 character text screen.

Since the Internet was still ArpaNet and the exclusive domain of scientists and the military, "online" meant paying a service like CompuServe $12 an hour for a connection to their servers.

Online "porn" consisted of text files that could be printed out and viewed from a distance -- the shading of different letters and numbers on the page would make a black and white picture. This simply goes to show that any technology will be perverted to deploy porn, no matter how hard or relatively pointless it is to do so.

Compuserve had a bit of an underground BDSM community that I found and participated in and found the numbers to some BBSes in Boston and San Francisco. A BBS was a privately run Bulletin Board Service -- sort of like the forums and chat here, but run out of someone's house on a single PC with individual phone lines instead of an Internet connection (because the Internet didn't exist); if the guy had six phone lines, then six people could be online at the same time.

I was able to participate at sixteen because nobody really checked ages online in those days. Computers were pretty rare and modems even rarer and the authorities were completely clueless so nobody cared -- if someone was interested, they were interested and that all that mattered.

Once I turned eighteen, I wanted to actively participate in things, which is where the Boston and San Francisco BBSes were a godsend -- my town had absolutely no hetero-BDSM scene that I could find and the gay scene wasn't my primary interest, so the online connections I'd made in Boston and San Francisco allowed me to travel there already knowing people who could show me around. It still cracks me up that I had to go to San Francisco for straight-kink.

Between 1987 and 1990 I ran my own BBS, trying to get a local online community started, but expense of the phone lines caused me to have to shut it down.

By then I'd moved to AppleLink, anyway, which morphed into AOL when Quantum merged their three services: AppleLink, QLink and PCLink.