You first would buy a modem for maybe $100, which was a little box you plugged into the serial port of your computer on one end, and a phone jack on the other e

You first would buy a modem for maybe $100, which was a little box you plugged into the serial port of your computer on one end, and a phone jack on the other end. Then you'd plug the modem into your home telephone system. Home PCs didn't typically come with an Ethernet port in those days, and wi-fi wouldn't be a thing for another decade or so. The modem usually came with a floppy disk containing software to use it, which typically looked like a terminal window, sometimes with additional menus to simplify things like dialing and file transfers. Then you needed to find the phone number of a local BBS. There was no Internet at the time, so typically you'd get this through going to computer trade shows, or asking around, or occasionally computer books & magazines had local directories. You'd dial up this number and connect to the BBS. This tied up your phone line and their phone line, so people who were seriously involved in the BBS scene usually bought another phone line (about $30/month). Modems had a distinctive screech that you'd learn to love, which is apparently now on YouTube. The actual interface was almost pure text, and had features like forums, file transfer, and occasionally chat. Basically you'd leave messages for people who'd dial in after you, and exchange files. In general, there was no real-time communication, and the scale was much smaller than today's worldwide social networks (typically each BBS might have a few dozen to a few thousand users, so like HN for the first month or two of its existence). Everything was slower-paced than today's Internet; you had to actually delay gratification and check back tomorrow rather than seeing if you got a response in 5 minutes. The hardware also was slower. On a 2400 baud modem, if you were a fast reader you could read the text as it came over the phone line (2400 baud is only 300 characters/sec, which is like 50 words/sec, and much of that was formatting boilerplate you could skim over). None of this graphics or video stuff. I remember downloading my first MP3; it took 2 hours to download, and every time the connection dropped (like, for example, if a family member picked up the phone) I'd have to start over again. I think it actually took like a week of wall time, and then I found my computer wasn't fast enough to play it back in real time, so I needed to decompress it, which required buying a new hard drive so I could fit the 40MB decompressed that a 4-minute MP3 expands to. The industry was tiny by today's social networking standards. It was a hobby for most of the players involved, not something you could really make money off of. Really it's the telecoms that made the money, off all the people buying second lines. The biggest lasting breakthrough was that it showed communications and networking could be a major use-case for PCs, which paved the way for the Internet and WWW a few years later.