This week's episode was supposed to be a micro episode, but it turned out so well,

I've upgraded it to a full episode and tacked on a long overdue listener mailbag segment.

So please enjoy.

Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of Retro Nots Micro. And I think this one's really

going to be micro instead of one of those like hour and 10 minute micro's that isn't actually

because we don't really have a plan for this one. Bench suggested we talk about our early online

gaming experiences. And I can talk about that right now for myself. Okay, there we go.

But some of us played online games more than the others. So I thought this would be fun just to do

kind of an anecdotal like, you know, here are my experiences kind of episode.

And you I can talk about some stuff. Anyway guys, why don't you introduce yourselves?

The main culprit here. Ben Jedwards. I am the culprit. Who wants to talk about online stuff?

And yes, what do you want me to say? I don't know. I am Ben Jedwards. I run vintagecompuny.com

and I write about computer and video game history and also network history, BBS history a lot.

So you said someone would be very good to talk about this subject. Yeah, I mean, I've written

about Prodigy and Compuserve and BBS's and the early web and the early internet. And I was

involved with a lot of them myself. Well, there you go. And and I'm Ben Elgin. I'm also old. So I was

around with this early stuff was happening. And yeah, I spent some time on dialing BBSs and some

time in early text based online stuff. So so we got a few things we can talk about here probably.

Cool. And then I am someone who got online in the early 90s and didn't use it the game.

I don't know. I feel like it's deficient or something. I just don't.

Did you have friends to play with? I think if you're online, you don't need friends. It's just

there's a deal back then. It wasn't like a matchmaking thing. You had someone to connect to.

...