There's a lot you'd have to understand. Not technically, but culturally. In particular: - Most houses had one phone line. The phone line was shared by the h

There's a lot you'd have to understand. Not technically, but culturally. In particular: - Most houses had one phone line. The phone line was shared by the household. Without email, text messages, social media, instant messages, basically the only thing faster than mailing a physical was using the phone. Hence the single phone line could be a point of connection. - Long distance calling was very expensive compared to now. If your mom was calling your aunt in another state, they'd be paying attention to the time on the call. If you were told to say hi to your aunt, you'd be told "hurry up, it's long distance" - There was no stack overflow. If you had a question, you were limited to asking those you need in person or maybe a computer magazine. - The common person didn't interact much with a computer. They would know what it was, but it was novel. Of course, there were exceptions. I'm sure in the bay area, it was much easier to find someone who understand BBSes, or to get a 2nd phone line just for your modem, but for most of America the above was true. Hence, BBS action would often happen when other family members wouldn't use the phone. Late at night was great, because that was when it was socially unacceptable to call. And BBSes would tend to have a local community. Local both in the sense of the board, but also physical distance. The combination of technical proficiency + locality led to it tending to be less like NextDoor & more a cluster of local nerds. Most BBSes I remember tended to focus on some combination of 3 things: warez, message boards, & games. The games would be similar to what you might get pre-installed on a flip phone, with the advantage of a shared score board. For warez, the community hated leeches, and often would impose an upload ratio. (You can upload so much stolen software before you could download anything.) As the Internet became more common, FTP servers would replace most warez boards. Likewise Usenet would suck up a lot of message board activity. My brother ran a popular board in our area. e did a fundraiser to buy an external drive to host more software, and raised just over $1,000. The thing that stuck with me was he used that to buy a massive drive for time -- one gig. As disk prices have fallen, that data point $1,000/gig, has stuck me as a benchmark.