The busy signal at 11:47 p.m.

At 11:47 p.m., the telephone line was busy again.

He knew it would be. There was one number written on a folded slip of paper beside the keyboard, and he had been trying it for the better part of an hour. The board was called Night Shift. Someone in town had a 14.4 modem and a stack of games. Its file section was said to contain the newest version of a program nobody at school could find.

The dial-up program displayed BUSY. He waited a minute. Tried again. The house was quiet except for a refrigerator humming down the hall. His parents had gone to bed, which meant the kitchen phone probably would not be lifted at the worst possible moment.

Finally, the click. The warbling negotiation. The answer.

CONNECT 14400.

The ANSI welcome arrived line by line. Someone had drawn a city skyline out of characters and bright colours. It wasn't a picture in the modern sense, but it felt more like entering a place than clicking a link. Under the skyline was a little message: Welcome home, night owls.

He read the new messages first. A familiar handle had finally solved a sound-card problem. Another caller was arguing about which baseball simulation was best. Then he entered the file section and located the ZIP.

The estimated transfer time was long enough to make him nervous. He started it anyway.

At midnight, the progress bar crept onward. At 12:03, he heard footsteps in the hall and froze. At 12:04, there was a faint modem retrain that made his stomach drop. But the connection survived.

The transfer completed at 12:11 a.m. He left a short note thanking the SysOp for keeping the board online and signed off. By morning he would have the utility installed. By the weekend he would have forgotten the struggle to download it.

What he would remember, years later, was the electronic voice of that one computer in another house, and the satisfaction of finally getting through.