I first started dialing into bulletin boards as a tween, on a 386 (and later a 486) cobbled together from bits scrounged from garage sales and the e-waste from the various businesses of my parent's friends or friends of friends. I eventually came into an 8-bit ISA modem, and upon recognizing what it was, added it into my computer, and snuck a telephone cable from an open jack into my room. I found the BBS listings in a local computer magazine and and started dialing out, exploring my area code. To be honest, I don't recall how I got the terminal program I initially used; I just recall that it was bare-bones and kinda janky. As a kid, you bet your sweet ass I went straight for the games section if there was one. And there I discovered TW:2002 and Legend Of the Red Dragon.
The sysop of one of the boards I dialed into noticed I was connecting at 2400bps at a time when 28.8k and 33.6 were commonplace. He pulled me into sysop chat to ask what was up and I explained my situation with my computer being cobbled together from scrap. He offered to send me a newer modem as well as some terminal software that didn't suck, and so I gave him my mailing address. I don't recall if I got my parents' permission to do so. In either case, a week or so later package showed up in the mail with a 16-bit ISA 14.4k modem and a floppy disk with a terminal program that indeed didn't suck. And with connection speeds that didn't cause a full screen of ANSI art take minutes to load, line by painful line, TradeWars became much more playable.
I logged many hours in TW:2002 through middle school and early high school. The holy grail I heard about, but initially couldn't play, were those really fancy BBSes that had multiple lines and the latest version that let you play against other players at the same time. Those were fancier operations where you had to pay monies for your dial-in time, which was not a particularly feasible thing when you're not even old enough to have a job, much less a bank account. It until wasn't towards the end of high school when I found a few sites offering connections over telnet that I got to experience multi-player play. And promptly learned just how bad of a player I'd been all that time.
A back-burnered project still intend to get to is to set up a retro system to run a multi-line (or maybe even network connected!) BBS, with all the various classic games of that era, including TW:2002.