I just recently re-watched the documentary on BBS era computing called “BBS: The Documentary”.
You can watch the series on youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgE-9Sxs2IBVgJkY-1ZMj0tIFxsJ-vOkv
I found this movie to be a great summary of what it was like when I was growing up using a computer, before the Internet became popular.
It turns out there are still a great number of BBS’s running to this day. You can connect to them via the telnet protocol. An excellent telnet client for visiting BBS’s in “SyncTERM”, which is available here.
Once you have a client, you just need to get an address of a BBS. There are various websites that have BBS listings, a good one is BBSlink, which is here.
It’s great to be able to log into these systems and play many of the games from the 80’s+90’s that I wasted countless hours on as a kid! I have started to create some project pages (linked to from the top) which have some ANSI images from various BBS’s and programs I wrote back in the day.
I’m sure i’ll be posting a lot more about BBS’s in the future.