> what was the cost involved Modems were expensive, and well, computers were not cheap either. You had to pay the communications time, but well, as a final us

> what was the cost involved Modems were expensive, and well, computers were not cheap either. You had to pay the communications time, but well, as a final user, with local calls + night rate, it wasn't a big deal. Probably more so for sysops which had to rent an extra line and do the interconnect between BBSes for networks like FidoNet (but again, at night most of the time). It also depended on your country's pricing policy for lines and communications. Americans for example had it better than French in that respect. Each country developed a different subculture based on communication price and organisation, hardware price and so on. Still I'd say modems where the main hurdle. They were really expensive until 14.4k became popular and cheap knock off appeared. > what were the entry barrier for an average person to join First, you had to be into computers. It was mostly before the family computer explosion. Then you had to hear about BBSes and buy yourself a modem that you would basically only use for that purpose, just to try and dive in an unknown world. Also, in France we had the Minitel, which was provided for free, so on one hand that piece of hardware was given, available in most households and gave access to a variety of services, and on the other hand you had to buy an expensive modem for ???. Hard sell for a long time. So when the BBS scene finally kind of took off, it was very late, almost already time for it to shutdown because Internet (web, Usenet) was taking over. > How similar was it to current social media networks Not much :-) Personally, I was more into FidoNet than pure local BBS (over here a BBS would only have a small number of users); FidoNet was pretty much like Usenet, a collection of thematic discussion forums anyway. It also meant I didn't often connect to the BBS graphic/terminal interface. My 'mail' program (Terminate) would simply connect to the BBS, and automatically send my messages and retrieve the conferences content that had arrived since my last connection. https://dedicatoafidonet.altervista.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/term2.jpg https://dedicatoafidonet.altervista.org/wp-content/uploads/2... https://dedicatoafidonet.altervista.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/term3.jpg https://dedicatoafidonet.altervista.org/wp-content/uploads/2... > How big the industry around it actually become There was no such thing over here; perhaps it was a thing in the USA.