This morning I was thinking about the old Bullettin Board Systems, or BBS in short. They were popular ways of communicating between computers during all the eighties and the early years of the nineties; then with the raise in popularity of the internet they were swept away.
In particular here in Italy we also got the "Videotel", a service that was similar to the much popular French "Minitel", that allowed to get informations about trains, planes and weather forecasts from home... it was limited but back in the eighties it was really an amazing thing 
I can even remember that Philips has sold (at least here in Italy) a special MSX1 machine that was build exactly for connecting to the "Videotel" 
It was called the NMS-801, and some websites claims that it was the last MSX machine created by Philips. Here's a photo:
( http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=1084 )
And this is an old paper advertisement for that computer:
So I'm wondering if somewhere in the world there are still some BBS working, maybe still open to let people share MSX games and apps...
