Way back in college, I took a class on systems programming where, because our professor was awesome, we logging in to macs remotely and pretended it was BSD Unix and worked on YACC and stuff. I'd of course used my linux terminal locally, but something about logging in to remote machines (and reading The Cucoo's egg) was undeniably cool, especially the idea of logging in to one other people also used. I hosted one of my first websites there, discovered and explored gopher, usenet, and of course (mostly lurked) the bboard.