Another day, another #moralpanic about Those #Kids These Days and all the #Crazy Stuff They Say On The #Internet.
Forty years ago (!) I was a fourteen-year-old #JROTC cadet, in the last great hot time of the #ColdWar, obsessed with reading #SoldierOfFortune. I was also an early adopter of what's now called social media.
They were called bulletin board systems, or #BBSs for short. Usually somebody's home computer with a few phone lines coming in. You'd dial the number, wait for the screech to come through the handset, slam the handset into the modem's acoustic coupler, and ... magic happened.
On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog. But on BBSs, they sure knew you were a kid—the more so the more you tried to hide it. Not that many of the adults were much more mature, but I digress.
See, kids do kid things. In my case, as the abovementioned 14-year-old SOF-reading cadet, it was the signature I appended to every post: "Dan the Merc."
There. That's a thing you know now.
Can you imagine anything cooler? Anything tougher? Anything more ABSOLUTELY BADASS? Wait, don't answer that. You in the back, stop snickering.
Relax. Kids grow up.
By '83 I was using the Hayes modems -- no need for those goofy acoustic couplers.
