User tomasino shared a few early cyberspace memories on his
phlog[1]. Another user mentioned "xyzmodem" in IRC which
brought back a "flood of memories" for him. His post did the
same for me; though, his particular experience of those
memories sounds a lot more profound perhaps that what I
experienced.

Mostly, it was the mention of Prodigy that brought me back.
Prodigy was my first "online" experience. I can still see
the 2400 baud modem that my dad had sent us. It plugged into
the wall and hung there, like an over-sized louvered wall
wart. I just located it with image search- it was a
Hayes model 3110US. I'm tempted to buy one on ebay right
now, but I haven't had a copper line in years...

The only thing that I recall doing back then was playing
some strange maze game. I never got into chat or anything
else. Oh man, I just searched that game out on image
search; "Mad Maze" was the game. I haven't seen those
screens in decades. Thanks tomasino.

After prodigy, I used that same modem to connect to local
BBSes in the Portland OR area. Like tomasino, I also had a
friend that would connect terminal-to-terminal with me to
"chat." Eventually we programmed our own BBSes in basic, but
we couldn't tie up our parents phone lines, so they never
went anywhere. He did go on to run his own wildcat (I think
it was) BBS on his own phone line for a while. At some point
we got faster modems; I still recall how awesome 19.2k was,
a 33.6k "soft" modem that sucked, and the pinnacle of
technology, the USRobotics 56k. We used to dream about
getting two phone lines and "shotgunning" two modems at
once. We never did it.

That friend eventually worked for an ISP, which was cool. We
somehow got a bunch of email logins for the customers and
tried to use them to get signup points for free stuff on
some website, rocket-something or other. We thought we were
quite clever, but we never got a thing. Thankfully, no one
ever caught on either. Ah the stupidity of youth.

Thanks again for the memories. Those things are up there,
but they don't generally come out unless prompted by
something.

[1] gopher://gopher.black:70/1/phlog/20180408-cyberspace