>BBS was the best system ever except for the horrible busy signal because someone was signed on. By the mid-80s multi-line BBS's were supported, the question i

>BBS was the best system ever except for the horrible busy signal because someone was signed on. By the mid-80s multi-line BBS's were supported, the question is whether the operator could afford them. When I was a kid I was dialing into a multi-line chat BBS in the Chicago suburbs. I also dialed into a few traditional BBS's that had 2-4 lines. The BBS revolution was ultimately self-limited. Phone lines were very expensive and that limited who could call you and how many users you could support. It was tough to monetize BBS's as everyone just kept redialing the free ones as opposed to busy-free access to the paid ones (sound familiar?) BBS's were a stop gap measure until we could get real digital connections to the home. Its incredible how the phone monopoly never really understood this outside of super-expensive and super-slow ISDN. Why we didn't have a DSL-like product in the mid to late 80s is beyond me. The demand certainly was there as geeks and businesses were butting their heads on POTS limitations by then. I guess that's just how phone monopolies work. In my neck of the woods the first available broadband wasn't DSL. It was Comcast cable. For all the shit cable providers get, in the early days, they helped keep the phone monopolies honest. The same way google fiber is keeping them honest today and how 2gbps Comcast service is keeping AT&T gigapower honest, etc.