> The missing piece of the puzzle is online location!
This is something that I think has, oddly enough, gone backwards as technology has improved. BBSs had a very strong sense of location, while the internet is much flatter and amorphous, because everyone can connect to everything.
I think you misunderstood me. I mean real-time online location, as in I'm on news.ycombinator.com right now. My friend is on facebook.com right now. I'm not talking about geophysical location.
Oh I agree; I didn't mean that BBSs were tied to geographical location (though there was some of that), but that they provided a strong sense of online location. You were on a particular BBS at a particular time, not on another one; and you couldn't have 30 tabs open to 30 different BBSs. If it was a multi-line board, you could see who was online at the same time as you. That sort of thing made it feel more like a virtual location.
This is something that I think has, oddly enough, gone backwards as technology has improved. BBSs had a very strong sense of location, while the internet is much flatter and amorphous, because everyone can connect to everything.