The cost was not too high: if your family already had a computer, you just had to buy a modem, although they were somewhat expensive for a kid at the time. Aft

The cost was not too high: if your family already had a computer, you just had to buy a modem, although they were somewhat expensive for a kid at the time. After you had the hardware, you still needed a few more things though: first, you had to know of phone numbers for local BBSes. In my area, they were all listed in a local computer user newspaper that was available at the local Micro Center. Once you had the modem and phone numbers of local BBSes, you also needed a terminal program to actually dial in. I think I got mine at a local bookstore that also sold shareware software on floppy disks. Once you had all those things, you were ready to start. For me it was mostly just dialing around to local BBSes, seeing what files they had, playing door games (i.e. online games hosted on the BBS), and downloading shareware games and stuff. I didn't do a whole lot of interacting with other people on the BBS outside of games - for one, there was never any things like realtime chat with other users except on boards with multiple phone lines which were pretty rare. Also, all downloads took forever, so people were always experimenting with new download protocols to try to eek out a little more speed - that was a big thing at the time. It was all very niche and not really very mainstream - mostly just computer nerds did it. Once internet service providers became more mainstream, BBSes died out, because who wants to dial into some local podunk bulletin board service when you could be connecting to people across the whole world?