I was just rabbit-holed into the Wikipedia articles on Fidonet, UUCP and other proto-internet systems, and it made me remember again a big thing I can’t remember – the reason I originally got a modem.

I didn’t need one for paying work and I didn’t yet have any friends who were online, such as it was at the time. I was a typesetter and starting to work with early page layout programs but nobody I knew was a programmer or even an amateur hacker. Moving files around was done with floppies, nobody was uploading or emailing files around yet. I didn’t tend to splash out on tech gadgets, either.

But with the modem I discovered BBSes, and through them, I met a circle of local folks who knew about Fidonet and “doors” and who were into Pyroto Mountain. 

One of these people offered to get some of us UUCP connections, and that was my first actual email address @ozrout.uucp.  Then I stumbled into Usenet and we all know how that went.

But why did I want a modem and what was I expecting to do? I have a good memory for so many things in my life, but not this. It feels like a weird gap as you’d expect if someone had done a Jedi mind trick to coax me online. But that’s not something I can really believe.