Diversi-Dial Forum - DDial!

Diversi-Dial Forum - DDial!


It’s a vanished era that history seems mostly to have forgotten. I always feel a wistful tinge of nostalgia whenever I think back on that time, and how pivotal it was in so many of our lives. It’s a sense of community that kids today will never experience because the ubiquity of the Internet and cell phones and texting saturates their lives in connectivity from the very earliest days of their childhood. Not that there’s anything wrong with that (progress and all), but it’s a wholly different experience.

Diversi-Dial Forum - DDial!

Diversi-Dial Forum - DDial! Seems as if many of the Old SchOOlerz from way back when DDial was like "The American Idol" have since gone or past away. I can't even believe that I even host such a system 24hrs 7 days a week from my home residence, but yeah it's true! Looking back now I realize how relatively short and unique that era was, and how lucky I was to experience it, and how difficult it is to explain that to people who didn’t also experience it (“it’s a modeming thing, you wouldn’t understand”). It was at a brief but crucial juncture in our cultural history when technology was advanced enough to facilitate electronic communication but primitive enough to limit that communication in a way that kept it feeling “local” while inspiring in us a sense of ownership over the systems we used, not to mention an incentive for taking those connections offline and into the real world. I can still vividly recall getting kicked out of the mall by overzealous security guards on many occasions during BBS meets where I met some of my best friends for the first time (the details are a bit hazy but the contours of that precious memory remain).