I miss the BBS days. I ran "The Learning Curve BBS" out of Torrance, CA... Fidonet (1:102/332). I ran it for 10 years, from 1990 to 2000. One public and one private node for a few friends. FrontDoor, FMail, RemoteAccess, x00, Blue Wave, JCQuick, THDProscan, and about 20-30 doors. I carried tons of echomail areas, and of course netmail and even internet email via a good friend who ran Salata BBS and could convert between netmail and email. The BBS multitasked under Desqview/QEMM and sat on a Novell 3.12 server.
My favorite part was that I gave computers to several of my users. I've always been a hardware geek, and everyone I know gives me their old junk machines, which I use to build Frankensteins. I'd give those old Frankensteins to users, which really blew a few minds, and made for some devoted users.
I was greatly saddened after the progression of Windows OS through 3.1/95/98/2000/XP made it so that you couldn't just give an old computer to anyone, because they all expected to be able to run the latest and greatest OS... because all they knew how to do is click on something and hope something good happens.
The first half of the 1990's was a heck of a good time in computing. Now you've got me waxing nostalgic. I'm looking at the batch file that ran the BBS. It's 8k of fun.