You would (typically) have a dumb terminal experience. You'd use your computer and modem to log into a remote system. You would use a newsreader to browse ne

You would (typically) have a dumb terminal experience. You'd use your computer and modem to log into a remote system. You would use a newsreader to browse newsgroups. If there was something that you wanted, like binaries, they would be saved on the remote system. You'd then need to ftp them from that system to your own. If you were one of the fortunate ones to have a hard-wired connection, well, that happened a lot faster. Newsreaders were awesome for reading newsgroups. You were able to add someone or a topic to a kill file for one group or all groups. As binaries got bigger and bigger, the retention time for them on the remote system got shorter and shorter. You might have 7 days of binaries and 90 days of everything else. For a while some forum software would be accessible via NNTP which was awesome. It let more people use the forums but gave more experienced users much better tools.