alt Hacker NewsThank you for this!
I grew up in a small town in the middle of nowhere and there were zero BBSes or AOL access points or anything that wasn’t a long distance number and there was no practical way for me to pay for that at that age. Bark was the first time I communicated with another person using my computer.
I found an old Bark Music cassette tape at my parents house recently and went looking online for any mention of Bark and couldn’t find anything at all, as if the entire thing had been a fever dream.
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Yeah, I was in the same boat. Lived in the middle of nowhere and long distance was expensive, so regular BBSes might as well have been on a different planet for me.
I heard there was a BARK magazine, and a BARK T-shirt but this is the first time I've heard about a cassette! Thanks for sharing that.
I found a "BBS on a CD" as a kid in the 90s. It was intended for people setting up a new BBS but it came with a good chunk of content to seed the system with.
Unfortunately, due to the nature of BBSes a lot of the stuff wasn't terribly useful for just one person. Emailing yourself isn't terribly useful. Door games were usually multiplayer, although LoRD was playable solo, and was in retrospect a precursor to games like Farmville.
The part where the BBS admin would call your number to verify your identity was real as well. It was always fun to explain to mom why some totally random guy was calling and asking for me.