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Since I'm not from the Philly area, I never had anything to do with these guys.
I was first on-line in about 1980 or 1981. My dad was/is a prof in a small college in New England, and the mainframe there was connected to the mainframe at Dartmouth Univeristy. We had a Heathkit terminal at home that my dad built from a kit, and we/I would phone in to the local college computer with a 300 baud modem with the rubber cups that grip the handset of the phone. Talk about slow. You could see the words slowly fill the screen one character at a time at about the same speed that you could follow them with your eye and read them. We had a separate phone line for the computer so we could get calls when someone was online. Once connected to the local college, we could connect to Dartmouth and join the chat room they had. We weren't connected to the rest of the world, just Dartmouth, but you could always chat with someone there. I was a junior high kid who would talk to the college students at Dartmouth and try to act like I was a college student too. I don't think I fooled anyone.
They also had the Adventure word-based computer game, so I would play that sometimes too.
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