Sorry it's way old skool. Back in those days (c. 1990-91) the Internet really only existed for the military and universities. There was no such thing as a web browser yet (Mozilla might have just been coming out in beta); the only thing on tcp/ip was telnet and usenet and ftp, and virtually no such thing as an ISP. I was able to hit Usenet via my university's computer lab, through a command line interface on a Unix terminal.

So BBSs were what we used for "online games" and Patel's SRE and later Earth 2025 was the fluff, if you were lucky enough to have a local BBS that was running the correct type of BBS software that supported the SRE door game, and had installed SRE (back in the day any phone number > about 20 miles away from you incurred long distance charges by the minute).

Anyway sorry for the ancient history lesson. Lol

It's amazing to me that the SRE algorithm has survived and been ported over to the web. Lots work to do that..