Huh. Didn’t know that about OS/2’s popularity among sysops. One of Temple’s BBSes (Waverley Park) presented what I now think was a Unix shell, or at least supposed to look like one, but I can’t imagine they were actually running Linux (ca. 1993)

TENet was the beginning of the end of my BBS days, with its real email and fancy WWW browser - lynx.

Full circle: being the old lady on the team talking about the digital American wild west of the 90s with BBSes (the saloons) and town ISPs (the general stores) to young German colleagues who have known nothing other than gradually increasing Telekom DSL speeds. (Texpats in Germany, represent!)

I used to run an 8-line BBS (Fidonet mail hub) on a single 486DX2-66 machine with 8MB of RAM under OS/2 2.11 back in 1993-97. I often played games or used C compiler at same time. This same machine also was a local LAN server (running IBM LAN Manager), serving files to tens of other machines on 10Base2 coax ethernet in the office. Somewhere about 1996 we got a leased line internet connected directly to this same box over a serial line, the machine became an IP router and a remote access server allowing premium BBS users to run PPP/SLIP connections. That's how I got involved into ISP business. :-)