Visiting BBS's that run on actual or emulated hardware can be a nice trip down memory lane for those who were part of the 8-bit BBS community in times past.

IIRC, a large number of single digit constants were stored as variables to save memory since each use of one took up more memory than referencing the variable, and further it used something along the lines of Peano numbers and the fact booleans were represented as numbers to create them. Something like:

10 LET D0 = 0

20 LET D1 = (D0 = D0) <== some boolean that evaluated to true/1. I may have this backwards

30 LET D2 = D1 + D1

40 ...

I forget the details, but when all was said and done, when you ran the BBS there was zero free memory; not a single byte.

I had an Atari 800XL as a kid but had absolutely no access to a dial-up data line. BBS for Atari 8-bits sounds like a nice future-retro to me. The guys who had access to this were very lucky.

ATASCII animations FTW!