You needed to be very patient... Not only for the slow download speeds but the limited access lines on the popular boards. The one I frequented most had like 8

You needed to be very patient... Not only for the slow download speeds but the limited access lines on the popular boards. The one I frequented most had like 8 or so. This was a lot in those days. So a lot of time was spent redialling until you got a carrier tone... This also answers your question about the 'industry'. There wasn't much of one, as most BBSes were kept small by the capacity of dialup lines. That BBS with the 8 lines was in a friends' garage and every time he needed a new line the whole street needed to be dug up. This kept advancement slow. There was no big industry, at least not in the Netherlands. There were some big networks like CompuServe which were a bit like a mini internet, but in my country we eschewed them because they were super expensive. Most BBS'es didn't charge anything, or a cheap yearly membership for some extra hours or something. It was much more of a hobby thing than an industry. Cost was ok for local BBSes. Just the cost of a local call. When I started the cost was 16c per call, but this was dropped soon when modems took off, for obvious reasons. It became 16c per 10 minutes which was still not so bad. My parents (I was in school) could afford it. A bigger issue was my hoarding off the phone line. Because the BBSes had limited dialup lines, there was also a usage limit per day. So around midnight it was extra busy when people wanted to use up yesterday's allowance or take advantage of it renewing at midnight. In terms of downloading I didn't do that much. It was too slow and expensive, and boring. During a download you couldn't do anything else with the computer. I mainly spent my time chatting. Of course files were much smaller in those days but downloading was still a boring hobby. The sneakernet was often faster!! I did download a bit over packet radio (using the 27MC band with modems). It was ridiculously slow (media speed was 1200 baud but there was a lot of contention and interference needing a lot of retransmission so the effective throughput was a lot lower) but I would just leave it on overnight. Still, the sneakernet was much quicker. It would take all night to download 1.5MB from a friend 5km away. Just walking over there with a floppy was a lot quicker :) There were also mail/group mail networks like Fidonet, where you could batch all your mails and upload them quickly. which was more efficient.