Despite the threat of extinction, however, it turns out that some sysops never quite gave up on the BBS. In February of 2016, a sysop with the handle "Skip" brought a BBS called Dura-Europos back online after a hiatus of more than 23 years. The BBS had originally run from October 1986 through to April 1993. As you might imagine, getting it up and running again wasn’t easy.

“I had tried putting it back online several years earlier after I purchased an Apple IIe Platinum from eBay, but it failed,” explains Skip. Naturally, our interview took place within the Dura-Europos bulletin board system.

“The main reason I failed to get it online several years ago is that I was not aware of the Raspberry Pi and TCPser, those were the two missing ingredients.”