I got into BBSes around 1992, and started running one around 1994 (when I was 14). I was living in a medium sized town (150k) in Texas, and our city had around

I got into BBSes around 1992, and started running one around 1994 (when I was 14). I was living in a medium sized town (150k) in Texas, and our city had around 20 boards. The main costs were a computer ($2000-ish, $3700 in 2021 dollars), and a decent modem ($200-ish, again, $370-ish in 2021 dollars), which wouldn't stay decent for long. In the around 4 years I was doing BBSes, I spent something like the equivalent of $700 2021 dollars on modems alone. (I supported all of this with my juvenile lawn mowing business, where I mowed several of the neighbors lawns.) After a few months of serious BBSing (and before I started hosting my own), I convinced my parents to let me get my own phone line, which was around $15/month, which I also paid for. Compared to being online today, virtually everyone was local. I wasn't aware of anyone else on the boards being from significantly out of town. Comparing it to today's internet doesn't really seem possible. There are some structural similarities, but the scale is so radically different that the comparisons break down. It'd be like trying to describe the social lives of someone in a town of 200 in terms of the social dynamics of New York City. Except that that's still off by several orders of magnitude. A lot of these boards had a few dozen regular users. That was it. In larger cities some had hundreds or thousands, but really you'd recognize the handles of all regular users. There were also meetups in town, which I only went to once since I felt kind of out of place for being a young teen. Most of the folks were either university students or adults, almost all men, and it kind of blew my cover to be a 14-year-old sysop. Some boards used a lot of inter-board forums (FIDOnet), but most of the ones I was on didn't. There it was funny because usually they'd all exchange messages in the middle of the night through a network of long-distance calls. But because of that, messages weren't real-time -- they usually took a day to arrive. My board was a FIDOnet node, but almost nobody used it on my board (including me). But also, a lot of the content wasn't about chatting or forums. A lot of it was multiplayer games. Honestly, that's mainly what I did. Legend of the Red Dragon was the big game in those days. A lot of it was also about software... for better or worse, almost every board had a "FaF" (friends and family) section where the cracked stuff was, and if you were friends with the sysop, you'd have access to it. That was how I got access to some of the first compilers I'd ever used (which in those days were pretty expensive -- usually several hundred dollars). The tech ... very little of it seems to have made it over to the web. God, we had vector graphics (RIPscript) already in those days. In comparison, early HTML and Gopher felt pretty backward. They just had access to a lot more info.