Thanks for having me on the show, Bobby, it was fun!

For folks who are interested, here are the BBSes and websites we mentioned at the end:

Sites:
BBS Scene - http://www.bbs-scene.org
Telnet BBS Guide - http://telnetbbsguide.com
Break into Chat wiki - http://breakintochat.com/wiki/
Break into Chat blog - http://breakintochat.com/blog/

BBSes (require telnet client):
Black Flag (ansi): telnet://blackflag.acid.org:23
Black Flag (rip): telnet://blackflag.acid.org:2425
Battlestar: telnet://battlestarbbs.dyndns.org
Door Games Unlimited: telnet://dgu.dyndns.org

Really cool and informative episode. It's amazing that the early stages of file sharing, torrenting, in game chat, message boards and multiplayer gaming essentially started with BBS's. It was also cool to hear that the community was very cool with each other and helped each other out.

It was also interesting that those helper mods that people bought were the early days of microtransactions in games.

I'm not sure if I would quite call them microtransactions in games. Let me explain:

Door game authors made their money by selling games to BBS sysops -- not users.

Games were usually sold as crippled shareware. The sysop could download the game and install it on his board for free, but until he got a registration key, some important features would be disabled. In SRE, for example, you couldn't use the bank. In Assassin, you couldn't visit the Mystic Seer. In Falcon's Eye, many races, buildings, and spells can't be chosen. In this way, the software was "try before you buy" on the honor system. The transactions were usually done via postal mail, or sometimes with a credit card.

The expectation with shareware was that sysops who kept using the game on their BBS were supposed to register. But obviously many never did.

Individual users *generally* didn't have to pay anything to play games, unless they were calling a BBS that charged a subscriber fee. But these were the exception and not the rule.

In the case of TradeWars, it was so popular that users really wanted helpers/utilities to help them perform better in the game. So some programmers wrote these programs and charged shareware fees for them. In this specific case, the shareware registration fee would be paid by the user, not the sysop, since the utility was running on the user's computer.

My mind immediately went to addons that are created by the community and used in games like WoW and other MMOs when you started talking about player created utilities to help them in the game.