Bark: The Toll-Free BBS for 90s Teens

The other day I was thinking about the first communities I found online and, perhaps tangentially, to what degree they influenced the amount of therapy I now require to function normally as an adult. Our family's second computer came from Sam's Club. It was a 386DX with Windows 3.0 but my inner nerd would have nothing to do with cheerful bit-mapped color schemes, preferring instead to exit to MS-DOS and do all necessary computing and gaming from a command prompt and text-based GUIs. Hardware-wise, it looked and felt cheap. The machine was less reliable than the cardboard box it came in. It was a Packard Bell and if you were to read this paragraph to anyone who was into computers in the 1990's, they will hear that name and then simply close their eyes and nod quietly in sympathetic understanding.