That brings back memories. When I was aged 9-12, I made enough money mowing lawns during the summer to afford to have multiple phone lines to support my BBS. I made a bit of money during the fall raking leaves as well. But when winter time came, I had to always disconnect all of the additional lines because I could not afford them.

But I also kept one extra line just for my PC because it was always a pain to dial out to another BBS or chat room when my mother wanted to use the phone to talk to her long distance boyfriend.

A mirror? I first saw it as a common (US-centric) exterior metal door, with a window -- and with a shelf blocking the opening.

The blur does interesting things.

I recall old people being glad that air conditioning was invented.

> Glorious. This must be what is like when old people long for the hot car they lusted for in their youth.

Absolutely. The blog post goes to great lengths about why it's stupid to run a cluster, and I run a NAS in my house that has more horsepower than anything from the 90s, but there's a part of me that's still a teenager who wants to run a monster multi-node BBS

Or maybe this is like fondly remembering the busted economy car that you drove around with your friends? I have my first 386DX sitting on my desk right now and it looks exactly like the top left of that photo.

The hot car that we all lusted after was maybe something like a SGI Indy or an O2.

A lot of network interface cards had a socket for an option ROM that would allow network boot, but you could definitely fit a client on a floppy and boot that way, too. Novell Netware server would be the mostly likely server for that vintage of rig and a Netware client fit easily on a floppy.

Pretty standard option for any home with a teenager, to be honest. Long enough to drag the handset into the nearest coat closet when needed.

We have them at work on our voip phones so we can roll around to each other's cubes while talking to a client without putting that client on speaker. We have headsets and the like too but you're not always wearing it when the phone decides to ring.

it was 3D Realms official BBS

https://nitter.privacyredirect.com/ScottApogee/status/159372... Scott Miller - Apogee/3D Realms Founder :

>BBS's (bulletin board systems) were the backbone of the online world before the Internet came along in 1995. Apogee teamed up with Dan Linton's BBS, called Software Creations, and we poured $200k+ into it to grow it to nearly 140 call-in nodes with a T3 (high bandwidth) line.

Rachel says she had the photo as a postcard. It's likely that more postcards were printed, and that other people had owned those copies, rather than people being bots.

Click on the HN “past” link for this submission near the top of this page, then you’ll get to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30096565 (see the top comment there) from when the original image link was still working.

Many sites including Google offer reverse image search. You give it an image and it gives you a list of places it appears, sometimes in higher resolution or with more context (or different context, which can be interesting).