kurtsh
I was 10yo & had (access to) an original IBM PC 8088 with 64K & a cassette tape. It was my father's PC but I saved my paper route earnings & lawnmowing pay to get it to the max 256K on the MB & eventually buy a 360K floppy drive. JOY!
The sad thing was, despite finally getting a floppy drive, I couldn't afford DD floppy disks - they were $4-$5/each so I would go dumpster diving behind Computerland or the IBM Product Centers for casually discarded discs. My first 20 floppies were all from the trash. Some had bad sectors - one had coffee spilled on it - but I didn't care.
I eventually saved enough money for an "AST 6 Pack" expansion board clone at a computer swap meet. RAM expansion, battery-backed clock, 2 serial & 1 parallel port. And I'd buy memory one row at a time every month until I got 640k.
For Christmas, my Dad bought me a 2nd floppy, I was also around this time, a friend of mine "5-finger discounted" an accelerator crystal that overclocked the 8088 from 4.77mhz to 7.4mhz, almost doubling the speed.. and gave it to me for my birthday. I was in heaven.
One day, a friend said he'd sell me his 10MB Micropolis Hard Drive. He'd bought a 20MB Seagate MFM & an RLL controller to get 50% more storage from his hard drives but the Micropolis wasn't RLL compatible.
I borrowed the $50 I needed to buy the drive. It had 100ms access time & was the most massive, lousiest PoS I ever owned but it was mine & I no longer needed to boot to floppies.
All my nerd friends were BBSing by this time & I didn't have a modem. I'd cry myself to sleep dreaming of having the money for a Hayes 300 but it was $350. Too much for a 12yo.
One day, I biked to a De Anza College swap meet & there was a guy at a table selling a Hayes 1200 BAUD Internal modem. No packaging or anti-stat bag: $150. "It fell off a truck". I peed myself & called my Dad from a payphone to beg him for the cash.
I think he was proud of my gumption & drove over to loan me the cash.
₵ⱧⱤł₴ ⱤØ₥₱ NZ6F 🇺🇦💪🏻🇬🇱❤️@kurtsh 1200 baud crew represent. 4 line BBS? Wow nothing that cool in my local dial area. There were 3-4 decent boards and I probably gamed on two of them, mostly LORD, BRE/SRE, and TradeWars 2002.
@rombat I was in Silicon Valley so y'know, adults were around with the cash for 4 active phone lines, 4 modems & a 80386 rig that could handle the custom software they ran. The owner of Logon Unlimited sold his multiparty BBS software to businesses so it was all a business expense for him to write off.
Most boards were small-time file trading RBBSs or meager Fidonet message boards. Later PC Board & derivatives. Honestly, you rly had to dial long distance to get to the big time boards.