Oh to further story. I did write a bot for that BBS back then called Victor Mindmeld that actually posted on the BBS and responded to its own email. It was rather primitive and it made up email responses and BBS posts by parsing what people said to it. It was kind of an advanced Eliza/Racter type AI thing. It was very flawed but you'd be floored by how many people thought their conversations with it were with a real person.
It certainly was not even remotely something that should pass a Turing Test but surprisingly many people fell for it anyway.