As a BBS era kid, I know you’re not trying to simulate the whole thing right now in the comments section. I’d say: you would have done fine, in any era. People talk, they share methods, and you would’ve picked up whatever you needed.
I think it’s just a common sort of nightmare, worrying about being unprepared, dealing with the consequences of lack of preparation.
I recommend the first few minutes of Jason Scott’s The BBS Documentary, for an overview of how people communicated in the pre-internet days. Especially if you imagine yourself a telegraph operator chatting with neighboring stations in the 19th century or something.
Dungeons of Daggorath. I had a Color Computer 2 growing up, while we lived in a trailer park. I was still a little afraid of the dark, and the hallways and first person view with jump-scare monsters were a bit intense for me. I’d have to run from one end of the hallway to the other, to get to the bathroom and back.
The impressive event queue system in that game felt like magic to me, like I wondered what happened to the monsters when you turn the computer off.
I was a “smart kid” but I don’t think I was a smart kid.
(Something something original author, something something signed copy of the original source code on my github)