User tomasino shared a few early cyberspace memories on his 
phlog[1]. Another user mentioned "xyzmodem" in IRC which 
brought back a "flood of memories" for him. His post did the 
same for me; though, his particular experience of those 
memories sounds a lot more profound perhaps that what I 
experienced.

Mostly, it was the mention of Prodigy that brought me back. 
Prodigy was my first "online" experience. I can still see 
the 2400 baud modem that my dad had sent us. It plugged into 
the wall and hung there, like an over-sized louvered wall 
wart. I just located it with image search- it was a 
Hayes model 3110US. I'm tempted to buy one on ebay right 
now, but I haven't had a copper line in years...

The only thing that I recall doing back then was playing 
some strange maze game. I never got into chat or anything 
else. Oh man, I just searched that game out on image 
search; "Mad Maze" was the game. I haven't seen those 
screens in decades. Thanks tomasino.

After prodigy, I used that same modem to connect to local 
BBSes in the Portland OR area. Like tomasino, I also had a 
friend that would connect terminal-to-terminal with me to 
"chat." Eventually we programmed our own BBSes in basic, but 
we couldn't tie up our parents phone lines, so they never 
went anywhere. He did go on to run his own wildcat (I think 
it was) BBS on his own phone line for a while. At some point 
we got faster modems; I still recall how awesome 19.2k was, 
a 33.6k "soft" modem that sucked, and the pinnacle of 
technology, the USRobotics 56k. We used to dream about 
getting two phone lines and "shotgunning" two modems at 
once. We never did it.

That friend eventually worked for an ISP, which was cool. We 
somehow got a bunch of email logins for the customers and 
tried to use them to get signup points for free stuff on 
some website, rocket-something or other. We thought we were 
quite clever, but we never got a thing. Thankfully, no one 
ever caught on either. Ah the stupidity of youth.

Thanks again for the memories. Those things are up there, 
but they don't generally come out unless prompted by 
something.

[1] gopher://gopher.black:70/1/phlog/20180408-cyberspace