Dubai

A summer evening in a Saint Petersburg courtyard in the late 1990s: a crowd of young people, mostly guys and a couple of girls, standing in groups with beer, white-night light.

Back then we met people at sysop meets.

A sysop meet is when the owners of bulletin boards and those who hung out on them crawled out of their flats and got together to finally look at each other in the flesh. These gatherings were heirs to the point meets, and the point meets were by then already dying out along with the network that had spawned them: FidoNet was living out its last seasons, boards went dark one after another, the internet was only just starting up and cost a lot, and the town’s entire modem folk fitted into one room.

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