Ah, like Hilda I can still hear the sounds of that "handshake" asy 'puter tried to link toy ISP. And the joy of watching for 20 minutes as a picture slowly downloaded. How could it take so long.if there were no clothes to image?
What I find remarkable about those old dialup bulletin boards is how efficient they were at transmitting information. That was a requisite in an age when not everyone had access to unlimited local phone calls, and most BBS could support only one connection at a time.
One of my favourite utilities would dial the BBS number, transmit the username and password, scan the topics I’d flagged, compress the unread messages into a ZIP file, send the file back to me, and terminate the call. All in little more than two or three minutes, often less.
I could then spend hours reading the messages offline, compose responses, and log in to upload them as another ZIP file.
That kind of system might not make sense to the smartphone generation, but it did foster civilized discourse. I archived some of the topics from my earliest BBS, situated in Vancouver BC, and often revisit them.