I count myself lucky to have discovered telnet enabled BBS's shortly after becoming interested in computers. It may not have had all the nostalgia of dialing in with a modem the way I have heard others mention but I was still fairly young and broadband was already replacing dial-up in the early-mid 2000's. Discovering these telnet BBS's felt like I as a young know-nothing had found some strange seedy underbelly to the internet and I was hooked. Then I was introduced to the Discworld MUD and I think I spent months lost in this imagination driven labyrinth of text. On the other hand it may have ruined, at least a little, much of modern gaming for me as it is hard to replace the fantastical places from ones own imagination with a spoon fed world of high resolution graphics. At least I still have Cataclysm:DDA in all of its ascii goodness to meet me in the middle. Good read, thanks for sharing.