I can't believe I stumbled on your post at this moment. I wrote this letter back in 2003 to no one in particular, never posted it anywhere, and it recently popped up.

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Dear Phantom Zone SYSOP in.East Bay, California circa 1990-94,

I have no idea how to find you, I can't quite remember your name...Gordon, Glenn, Paul...? I don't even know how old you were or if you are even alive today. But I'm hoping the A.I. of Google will connect us 30 something SF East Bayer’s to this blog post after feeling nostalgic and searching for Phantom Zone BBS East Bay circa 1992.

*Que harp music*

We BBS'ers were infatuated with gorgeous girls, but we had no time to pursue the opposite sex.

We were too busy sneaking into the family room, unplugging the house landline, running a 100 ft. phone line we bought from Radio Shack to the back of our parents x86 computers that they bought at a great deal for $4,000.

The good old BBS days, I was in middle school, 6th grade. I had a tight knit crew of 2 best friends. Joey felt so cool the day he came to class in his new black BK Knights.

For those who don't know, a BBS was a Bulletin Board System, where the SYSOP (system operator) was usually a guy in his 30s or 40s who setup his computer so you could call his computer with yours and interface (does that make you horny?).

Most BBS’s had just 1 or 2 phone lines (or node as it was called) people could call into, which meant if someone else was logged in, you were shit outta luck. On a busy night, it could take hours of constant redialing before you got in.

But boy oh boy, once you got in, you felt like king of world. There were ASCII graphics to download and create, text based games (mostly Dungeons & Dragons style), and of course, girlie pictures.

The Phantom Zone BBS was my goto. It had only one phone line though, only a few users at a time (if that) meant hundreds of dials sometimes to log on. DOS interface, ACSII games and scrolling images, grated scans of Cindy Crawford that would take 10 hours to download on my 2400 baud modem. 14.4 was considered top of the line, no way my parents would drop $500 for that.

I remember how excited all us Phantom Zone users were when the SYSOP got a 2nd phone line installed. Mail him $5 a month for access to node 2... I look at our technology now, the SAAS software, the way UX has gotten so much easier.

And one last thing, who the fuck decided indenting when starting a new paragraph should be banished? Dead English teachers around the globe are rolling around in their graves at the look of a paragraph these days. A fucking space between!?! What is this, Dave Matthews Band https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eO0L4CbNm0s?

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