Sometimes called the 517, a subset of this was Legion Net. This community I got involved with when I went to MSU, and lived in the area some years after university.

Most of this was based off of the TAG BBS systems, thanks to one BBS sysop of some infamy putting together a kind of fast and dirty DIY kit for setting up TAG. In this way, the 517 was something like 90% TAG BBSs at one point, with Renegade and Maximus filling out most of the balance.

The college kids, hacker kids, sometimes the no life otaku 20-40 somethings, inhabited Legion Net, mainly because it was a free for all. Some boards were more piracy, some hacking, or just learning networking and new tech, mostly it was just socializing, various get togethers, sometimes people hooking up. There were I think up to 15 BBSs part of Legion Net, which shared various community boards, and then others, you had to jump onto that specific BBS to go and see, do, whatever.

The other BBSs in town, most were connected to the FidoNet system, there was the Lighthouse and JennysDogHouse that served at the Net 159 hubs, and a few others that worked as overload backhauls.

You had probably 4-5 Multiline BBSs in the 10-15 line range. A lady named Donut ran one that was popular with the teens for gaming and chat. There was Voyager which at the time was more a mix of adults and kids, and was VERY revenue driven, they eventually became and ISP, an their BBS faded out as the internet rose to prominence, and also as their founder died over time from HIV related complications. Most of them lived long enough for the “cure”, but enough damage was done to shorten their lives. A fair number of boards in town were in the 3-5 line range, mostly shareware downloads, door games, chat rooms, whatever else.

Transition into the internet age… Most early adopters had a Merit account through the college, their high school, a borrowed password account 5 people were using at once. The university was tolerant on this mainly because people forgot to log out at the labs, the library, the dorm, maybe back at home, their parents house. Mostly because the professors did the same damned thing.

Other ISPs backbone off the university fiber connection at first, the Merit Backbone goes all across Michigan, and I think down to Ohio and Indiana a bit. https://www.merit.edu/about/

This is how most people experienced the text, or VT-100 level internet. But Merit did certainly support trumpet-winsock, for people who got in early on Netscape, and various other ones.

ACDNet, was also an alternative for those who wanted internet, but were getting a bit old to mooch college friends Merit accounts. I think it was $20 a month for dialup or ADSL, Voyager was $30 a month, but was never busy, almost never dropped. And then the cable company in East Lansing offered 6 Mbs or 10 Mbs internet for $60 a month, or $100 a month. Which was first in the nation along with San Francisco for cable internet.

As HTTP based internet, AOL, and more graphical based internet became popular, Telnet BBSs, dial up BBSs, and the text based internet started to fade out. You had a few diehards keeping their dialups going until well past 2000s. And some of the hardcore OGs, like The Club out of Lansing, and Detroit, kept going until 2008 I think, but they’d been running off unix, and originally a TRS-80 system since the late 70s.

Post 2008, support for dialup internet, and “old copper” voice lines was dropping off pretty fast, so if you were running anything more than an old fax, or needed a modem to run faster than 28.8k uncompressed, you were out of luck unless you were in the city. Rural telecom systems no longer supported dialup, and would often bump someone off if they were connected more than 45 minutes.

And that’s the point when I mostly got distracted with life out west, and didn’t talk to people back in the old community much. At least not until everyone got onto Facebook, or whatever else.

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Used to run a multi-node BBS back in Ye Olde Piracy Days. Was a national HQ for TRSi. Good times :)