Monday night, Mason and I finally picked up an Xbox 360 . The fact that I bought an Xbox 360 isn’t as interesting as who I bought it from: the infamous Doctor Phrackenstein.

Doctor Phrackenstein (aka Shawn) is a friend of mine that I’ve known for, geez, over 20 years now. Ol’ Phrack and I met back in 1985, when I first started calling Commodore 64 bulletin boards. In fact, those of you who have read Commodork may recognize his name. Shawn was a good five years older than me; back when I was a twelve-year-old kid mid-high student first calling bulletin boards, he and his friends were about to graduate high school. I was definitely the runt of the circle, but that didn’t stop me from hanging around the tech-savvy group, listening to and learning intimate details about computers and the phone system — things that would be classified as “mischievous fun” back then, and “felonies” today.

BBSes were very localized; of the hundreds of users that regularly called my bulletin board, maybe half a dozen or so were long distance users. Local phone calls were free, so unless there was a compelling reason to do so, most people tended to stick to BBSes in their own area code. As local BBS users began graduating to the Internet (and from high school), those local circles of friends dissipated. Sure, some of us e-mail or chat online from time to time, but the personal visits all but ended. Back in the heyday of BBSes I probably saw Phrack on a monthly basis. Since the rise of the Internet over the past ten or fiften years, I’ve seen him twice — Monday night being the second time.

We’re both older now, of course. Phrack’s got a beautiful house and a lovely wife. I brought Mason along with me to meet Shawn, and on the ride over it donned on me that Mason’s only six years younger than I was when I first met Phrack. The first time I ever went to Phrack’s house (his parents’, actually) he had a Rocky Horror Picture Show poster hanging in his bedroom. At his new house, he’s building an upstairs home theater room. I saw a framed Rocky Horror poster leaning against the wall waiting to be hung and wondered if it was the same one from all those years ago.

Computer-based friendships are easy to pick back up. When your common interests are hard drives and videogames and gadgets there’s always something to talk about, regardless whether the things you’re talking about are from back then or now. Doesn’t matter, really. We had a good time catching up with one another and I hope we continue to chat and hang out from time to time. I know “they” say it’s not good to live in the past, but whoever “they” are didn’t grow up with the friends I had.