..that you were in an on-line community.

I started with this whole "virtual community" stuff back in 1987 when I ran a Commodore 64 BBS. We had about 200 to 300 members on the BBS. You used your phone modem to call the number of the BBS and connected to it. It was run on C-net 12.0 and later Image 1.0

That was how I met Pat (T-man). He ran a BBS called King Arthur's Court. I ran the BBS "Stardock".

All these BBSes had multiple access groups (0 through 9) and when we posted, our access rank was put in front of our name. So when I posted on Pat's BBS, I would be Lord Macros (that was my handle). On my BBS it would be Admiral Macros.

We tried to focus our BBSes to mainly be about the message boards. In order to download, you had to have X number of points and the only way to get those points was to post and respond in the message boards. This system worked pretty well. It was a really fun way to meet people in the local area who had like interests.

Not much has changed, as the "community" got bigger, the usual sorts of squables one sees here and on other websites would pop up. But most posts had to do about talking about "stuff" like the meaning of life, finding out what girls wanted in guys and vice versa. There were only a handful of girls versus a ton of guys.

Now, 14 years later (good gawd it's been that long?) not too much has really changed in terms of on-line communities. Sure, the people are from all over the world and they can all be on at once (as I type this, there are 295 other people currently on this website) but the message boards are almost all the same as they were then. Right down to the "what song are you listening to right now?" stuff.

So what place did you first learn about on-line communities?