WOW. I graduated up to an old IBM XT clone after the Atari. I gutted it, and installed a x386 board, different power supply, 4 1MB, 20 pin SIMMS, and a 20 MB, 5.25” hard drive and controller card, serial card for the mouse, 16 bit color video card, and a 9600 baud USR external modem. Wedged it all in there with pieces of Styrofoam. Wires were hanging out of places where there shouldn’t have been, I’ll tell you that. Jammed a 3.5” floppy into where the old 5.25” was, got an IT friend at work to give me a set of DOS 5 and Windows 3.1 floppies, and with a couple of days of tinkering, I was the terror of every BBS in my area code. LOL
Sounds like you learned a lot and had a lot of fun doing it. I love tinkering too.
LOL. I loved BBS's. I remember some of the different ones: Spitfire, Citadel, Tribbs, Wildcat, JetBBS... there were so many, but these seemed to be the most commonly used software in my area. Those were some fun times. I had a few friends who were Sysops... my favorite being a place called the Blue Light Special.