In the early 1980s: Dial the rotary phone, listen for carrier. If you got one, unplug the handset and plug it into the back of the VICModem. And have fun readi

In the early 1980s: Dial the rotary phone, listen for carrier. If you got one, unplug the handset and plug it into the back of the VICModem. And have fun reading posts by the locals at 300 bps. :) Basically it was 99% computer geeks using these things, I'd wager. The experience was very similar to Hacker News, actually. It was a bulletin board, after all. Except far more local and the threading UI was worse. Same arguments. :) Most BBSes only had one phone line, so if someone was logged in, you couldn't connect. You'd get a busy signal. When I finally got a Hayes-compatible modem, I could at least autodial until I got through. Some BBSs had games you could play. If you managed to get through before midnight, sometimes you could play today's turns, roll over midnight, and then play tomorrow's turns before anyone else, giving you an edge. The games I remember most were TradeWars and one called Dominion, IIRC. No cost as long as you weren't making any long-distance calls. Not really similar to existing social networks. And it was often a bunch of people in town that you knew in person, if the town was small enough. I remember when the first BBS in town joined WWIVnet and we were able to send email (very slowly) over longer distances without incurring long-distance charges. Then someone else got on FidoNet. And there was a Waffle BBS with NNTP, I think. Bang paths to send mail... Eventually in the early 1990s I got internet through my college and BBSs went largely forgotten after that.