Our family's second computer came from Sam's Club. It was a 386DX running Windows 3.0, but I preferred exiting to MS-DOS and doing my computing and gaming from a command prompt. The machine was a Packard Bell, a name that anyone who used computers in the 1990s will recognize with a sympathetic nod. It also came with a dial-up modem, and when I plugged it into the telephone line, my mom's reactions ranged from curiosity to alarm.
As a semi-rebellious teenager in the rural Midwest, I often begged forgiveness rather than asking permission. In the early 1990s, the Internet as we know it barely existed. There was email, message boards, file exchanges, IRC chat and remote login, but the web was still new and unfamiliar. Unless you lived in a city or attended a university with a strong technology department, you probably couldn't get online at all.
Bulletin board systems, or BBSes, had been around since at least the early 1980s. These were computers connected to phone lines. When you dialed a number, the other computer answered and gave you access to whatever software the sysop had set up. Most offered public and private message boards, and many also had file downloads and uploads, real-time chat, or games. The author can no longer recall exactly how they found the software needed to connect or the number of their first BBS, but they remember the text files they collected, including programming guides, hacking e-zines like Phrack, and plenty of conspiracy theories.
The author also remembers downloading as much software as possible, including development tools, terminal programs and DOS utilities. Over a 2400 baud modem, filling a 1.44MB floppy took about two hours. Eventually, the author persuaded their mom to buy a 14.4kbps modem, a purchase they still find hard to explain.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing